You believe America was founded as a Christian nation. You believe God has a special plan for this country. You believe the Bible should inform our laws, that marriage has one definition, that the border needs to be sealed, and that somewhere along the way, we lost our values and need to get them back. You believe Donald Trump, for all his flaws, was the man God raised up to fight for those values. You’d never openly call yourself a Christian Nationalist. In your own mind you’re just a Christian. Here’s the reality, if you believe the points mentioned above, you are by definition and Christian Nationalist.

So what is Christian Nationalism? It is the belief that a nation’s identity, laws, and culture should be defined by and organized around a specific expression of Christianity, and that this faith should hold a privileged position in public life over all other religions and over secularism. It is not simply being a Christian who loves their country. It is the insistence that the country itself belongs to Christians, was made for Christians, and should be governed according to Christian principles as interpreted by a specific political movement.

According to PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas, a survey of more than 22,000 adults across all 50 states, one-third of Americans qualify as Christian Nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. Among Republicans, that number is 56%. Among white evangelicals, 67%, the only major religious group where a clear majority holds Christian Nationalist beliefs. Christian Nationalism Adherents score overwhelmingly high on PRRI’s Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, 79% score high or very high, and 30% agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

And this is not a new idea. The 20th century is full of nations that tried it.

In South Africa, the Afrikaner National Party built the entire apartheid system on what they explicitly called “Christian Nationalism.” The Dutch Reformed Church provided the theological justification for racial hierarchy, arguing that God had created separate nations and intended them to remain separate. Future Prime Minister B.J. Vorster declared in 1942 that Christian Nationalism was an ally of fascism — what he called “an anti-democratic principle.” To be clear, the anti-democratic principle Vorster was refering to was liberal democracy. Specifically its emphasis on individual rights, universal suffrage, and the equality of all citizens. Through Christian Nationalism Vorster was in favor of an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state. He wasn’t confused about what he was building. He was naming it.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s party won a supermajority in 2010 and used it to pass a new constitution anchoring Hungarian identity in Christianity, a framework he has used to consolidate authoritarian control, crack down on immigration, and suppress LGBTQ+ rights under the banner of defending “Christian civilization.” Between the World Wars, Hungary’s earlier governments had pursued a nearly identical “nationalist Christian” policy, exalting heroism and faith while despising liberal and socialist thought. That experiment ended with fascists in power by 1944.

The pattern is consistent: Christian Nationalism fuses faith with state power, positions one ethnic or cultural group as God’s chosen people within that nation, and treats everyone outside that group, whether by race, religion, or politics, as a threat to the divine order. It always promises to protect the faithful. It always ends up serving the powerful.

This is not a fringe position. It is the dominant theology of one of America’s two political parties. And most of the people who hold these beliefs have never examined where they come from — or what they require you to accept.

But what if the Christ you’re following isn’t Jesus of Nazareth — the Jewish peasant who told a rich man to sell everything, healed on the Sabbath to make a point, and got executed by the state for threatening the social order? What if the Christ you’re following is a Christ built by empire, refined by colonizers, and sold back to you by billionaires and politicians who need your faith to function as a voter turnout machine?

This piece is a mirror. If the beliefs below sound like yours, I’m not here to insult you. I’m here to show you where they actually come from — because it’s not the Sermon on the Mount.

God Gave Us This Land

If you believe America was created for Christians, the next belief follows naturally: God gave us this land. The settlers weren’t invaders, they were fulfilling a divine mandate. The westward expansion wasn’t conquest, it was providence. The land was promised, and the people who were already on it were simply in the way.

This is Manifest Destiny, and it didn’t die in the 19th century. It just stopped announcing itself by name.

The theological scaffolding for this belief predates the American founding by centuries. In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued a series of papal bulls, the Doctrine of Discovery, that declared any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed, conquered, and exploited by European powers. The church didn’t bless colonization after the fact. It authorized it in advance. When Columbus made landfall in 1492, he carried that authorization with him.

The cross and the sword traveled together because theologically, they were the same instrument.

In North America, this logic produced the Indian boarding school system — institutions funded by the federal government and run predominantly by Christian denominations, explicitly designed, in the words of architect Richard Henry Pratt, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” To be saved meant to be made white, English-speaking, and Christian. The three were functionally synonymous. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documented in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, the missionary impulse and the colonial impulse were never separate projects. They were the same project with two names.

That theology is still breathing. PRRI found that many Christian Nationalism Adherents believe America was founded as a “Promised Land” for white European Christians. Think about what that belief requires.

If God promised you this land, then the genocide of indigenous peoples wasn’t a crime — it was a cost of fulfilling the covenant.

If God gave this continent to European Christians, then everyone who was here before them was a squatter on God’s property. That’s not history. That’s theology in service of erasure.

And it doesn’t stop at the founding. The same logic that justified taking land from indigenous peoples now justifies sealing the border. If America is God’s gift to a specific group of people, then anyone who doesn’t belong to that group is a trespasser — not just legally, but spiritually. PRRI’s data bears this out: 67% of Christian Nationalism Adherents believe that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” That’s not immigration policy. That’s Promised Land theology applied to the southern border.

The divine right of settlers didn’t expire. It just evolved.

God Protects America

There’s a belief that runs through American Christianity like a load-bearing wall: the idea that the United States has a special covenant with God. That divine favor explains American power. That God has blessed this nation above all others, and that as long as we remain faithful, as long as we hold the line on the right values, that blessing will continue.

Within the Bible belt its common to see homes with yard signs of 2 Chronicles 7:14,

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

This is American exceptionalism as theology. And it does more political work than almost any other belief in the Christian Nationalist toolkit.

If God protects America, then American military power is righteous by definition. It’s God’s will for the military industrial complex to exist. It’s even God’s desire that America has an unhealthy obsession with guns and military might.

Every war becomes a holy war, or at least a justified one. Every foreign intervention is providence in action. You don’t need to wrestle with the morality of drone strikes or the civilian body count of a twenty-year occupation if you believe the nation conducting it is operating under divine mandate. The flag and the cross fuse into a single symbol, and questioning one feels like betraying the other.

But the real damage this belief does is economic, not military.

If God blesses America, then America’s economic system must be part of that blessing. Capitalism becomes sacred — not just a way of organizing markets but a reflection of divine order. The rich are rich because God favored them. The poor are poor because something went wrong in their relationship with God — not enough faith, not enough discipline, not enough bootstraps. Prosperity theology is just “God protects America” applied to your bank account.

I’ve written about this before. In Why I’m Anti-Capitalist and The Master, The Lord, The Boss, I traced how capitalism requires an exploited underclass — how the master became the lord became the boss, but the fundamental relationship between owners and workers never changed. Christian Nationalism provides the theological cover for that relationship. It sanctifies the hierarchy. If God ordained this nation and blessed its systems, then the systems must be good — and anyone who challenges them isn’t just wrong, they’re ungodly.

This is why Christian Nationalism and class politics are inseparable. The belief that God protects America functions as the invisible fence around economic critique. You can’t question capitalism if you believe God built it. You can’t challenge the billionaire class if you believe wealth is a sign of divine favor. You can’t demand a living wage if you believe poverty is a spiritual problem rather than a structural one.

And the data confirms how tightly these beliefs cluster together. Christian Nationalism Adherents don’t just score high on authoritarianism and support political violence — they are overwhelmingly aligned with the political party that fights minimum wage increases, guts labor protections, and hands tax cuts to corporations while telling working people to pray harder. The theology and the economics aren’t separate. They never were. “God protects America” is the story the ruling class tells so you’ll protect them instead.

Christian Values Should Be Embedded in Government

Of all the beliefs on this list, this one sounds the most reasonable. Who wouldn’t want values in government? Who wouldn’t want leaders guided by something deeper than poll numbers and donor lists?

But “Christian values in government” is doing a very specific kind of work. It doesn’t mean love your neighbor. It doesn’t mean welcome the stranger. It doesn’t mean blessed are the poor. It means one expression of one religion gets to write the rules for everyone else. For adherents to that religion it also means anyone who resists is an enemy of the state and God.

In practice, “Christian values in government” means banning books from school libraries. It means posting the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. It means criminalizing reproductive healthcare. It means defining marriage for people whose marriages are none of your business. It means building a legal architecture that privileges a conservative Protestant worldview while calling it “freedom.”

And none of this is happening by accident. It’s being organized, funded, and scaled.

Kyle Spencer documented this machinery in Raising Them Right. What she found was a tightly organized, heavily funded ultraconservative initiative to transform American culture from the ground up — not through grassroots belief but through billionaire-backed organizations using social media, celebrity influencers, and campus activism to radicalize young people into the far-right fold. Figures like Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA, started with economics and small government but evolved into full-throated Christian Nationalism — opposing reproductive rights, rejecting marriage equality, championing “traditional values,” and insisting Christianity should lead the country.

Spencer found that conservative donors spend more than three times as much on youth activism and education every year as their liberal counterparts.

This isn’t a movement rising organically from the pews. It’s propaganda disguised in Bible verses being spewed from the pulpit.

The beliefs get preached in churches. The funding comes from billionaires. The legislation gets written by think tanks. And the voters who carry it to the ballot box believe they’re doing good Christian work.

PRRI’s data shows what this machinery produces. Christian Nationalism Adherents don’t just hold theological beliefs — they hold political ones that cluster together with striking consistency. Majorities believe immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Majorities support deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Majorities support stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they’re “determined to be a threat.” Nearly 80% score high on right-wing authoritarianism scales. These aren’t prayer requests. They’re policy positions — ones that would be at home in Orbán’s Hungary or apartheid South Africa.

“Christian values in government” is the most dangerous belief on this list because it’s the one that sounds the most like common sense. But when you trace what it actually produces — who funds it, who benefits from it, and what it does to the people on the wrong side of it — it’s not values at all. It’s a theocratic project dressed in the language of faith, and the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount would not recognize a single thing about it.

A Faith Made for Power, Not People

Every belief examined in this piece follows the same pattern. “America was created for Christians” serves the myth of a chosen people. “God gave us this land” sanctifies conquest. “God protects America” baptizes capitalism. “Christian values should be embedded in government” builds the theocratic infrastructure to enforce it all. Each belief sounds like faith. Each one functions as politics. And none of them — not a single one — comes from the mouth of the Jewish peasant who said blessed are the poor, who told his followers to sell their possessions and give to the needy.

If these are your beliefs, your religion is rooted in empire, capitalism, and whiteness, not Jesus. To be fair, Christianity is a religion of empire, America didn’t create Christian Nationalism, we simply remade it in our image. We wrapped it in stadium-style worship, energetic preaching, and a call to biblical fidelity.

This isn’t a conclusion I reached from the outside. I spent fifteen years as an evangelical pastor. I preached these systems. I built my life inside them. I defended the Christ of empire because I didn’t know there was another one. When I finally couldn’t reconcile what I was preaching with what I was reading in the Gospels, I didn’t just leave a church. I left the entire tradition.

And here’s the irony that still hits me: to actually live the values of the Sermon on the Mount — nonviolence, radical generosity, suspicion of wealth and power, solidarity with the marginalized — I had to walk away from Christianity altogether. I found those values in Zen, which teaches direct experience over doctrine and has no interest in converting anyone. I found them in Taoism, which distrusts hierarchy and institutional authority by design. I found them in anarchism, which insists that no one — no state, no church, no ruling class — has the right to dominate another person’s life. Every one of these traditions is anti-dogma, anti-hierarchy, and opposed to the logic of conquest. The Sermon on the Mount would fit comfortably in any of them. It has never fit comfortably in the Christianity of church history.

Christian Nationalism is not a corruption of the faith. As I argued in From Constantine to Trump, it is the faith, the one that was actually built, not the one that Christianity likes to advertise. The revolutionary Jesus was always the cover story. The institution was always the product.

The question isn’t whether you’re a Christian Nationalist. The data suggests that if you’re an evangelical in America, you have conformed and are most comfortable in white culture, you vote Republican, and your treatment of any outside group shows your fidelity to ‘make America great again.’

The question is whether you’re willing to look at the beliefs you hold, trace where they actually come from, and decide if the Christ you’re following is the one who taught the Sermon on the Mount, or the one the empire built to make sure no one ever took that sermon seriously.

Christianity has a Jesus problem. The figure at the center of the faith — itinerant, propertyless, executed by the state for threatening the established order — bears almost no resemblance to the institution built in his name. That institution has blessed crusades, colonized continents, built boarding schools to destroy indigenous children, and, in its American form, become one of the most reliable constituencies for military power and authoritarian politics. The peasant rabbi became the emperor’s chaplain, and he has never retired from that role. What if the story of the humble, revolutionary Jesus was never the point — but always the alibi?

The Religion Jesus Never Founded

Growing up, my Jewish dad used to tell me, “You know, when I went to church with your mom, there was always at least two Jews, me and the guy hanging on the cross.” At the time, I just thought my dad was being provocative. I now understand he was making a factual point — the historical Jesus was not a Christian. This is not a provocative claim — it is the consensus of contemporary New Testament scholarship. Scholars like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg have spent careers reconstructing the figure behind the theology, and what emerges is a Jewish peasant reformer operating entirely within Second Temple Judaism. He taught in synagogues, observed Torah, and directed his message almost exclusively at fellow Jews living under Roman occupation. He had no interest in founding a new religion. He was trying to renew an old one.

Christianity, in any institutional sense, is the creation of Paul of Tarsus. Paul’s letters are the earliest documents in the New Testament, predating the Gospels by decades, and the Christ Paul preaches is already a fundamentally different figure than the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. Paul’s Christ is a cosmic redeemer whose death atones for universal human sin — a theological framework with almost no grounding in anything Jesus actually taught. Paul was not transmitting Jesus’ message. He was building something new on top of it, shaped by his own Greco-Roman context and the organizational demands of communities scattered across the empire.

At this point, a good evangelical will reach for their Bible. Instinctively, they’ll go somewhere like Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission, and argue this text seems to settle the matter:

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

There it is, they will say — clear as day, Jesus himself commanding a universal mission. Acts 1:8 makes it even more explicit:

“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

A global institution spanning empires sounds less like a corruption of Jesus’ intent and more like its fulfillment.

The problem is that contemporary scholarship has serious questions about whether Jesus said either of these things. The Great Commission appears only in Matthew, the latest of the Synoptic Gospels, and critical scholars widely regard it as a composition of Matthew’s community rather than a traceable saying of the historical Jesus. It reads less like something a Jewish peasant preacher said on a hillside and more like a mission statement retrofitted onto the resurrection narrative by a community already committed to Gentile outreach. Bart Ehrman, hardly a fringe voice — like me, he’s a former evangelical, and unlike me, he is now one of the most widely read New Testament scholars in the world — has argued extensively that the Gospels reflect the theological concerns of the communities that produced them as much as they reflect the historical Jesus. Acts presents an even clearer case: written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke as a two-volume work, it is essentially the founding narrative of the Pauline church, mapping Paul’s missionary journeys across the Roman world and reading divine intention back onto them. “To the ends of the earth” is not a prophecy. It’s a description of where Paul already went, dressed in the words of Jesus.

This is the pattern that runs through the entire New Testament: the concerns of later communities, already shaped by Paul’s theological agenda and the practical demands of Gentile mission, written back onto the figure of Jesus. The Gospels, written after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, are themselves already institutional documents — produced by communities under pressure, working out questions of identity, authority, and membership. They are community formation texts, and they bear the marks of communities that were already moving away from their Jewish roots and toward something that could survive and spread in the Roman world. By the time the canon is assembled, the revolutionary Jewish peasant has been transformed into the universal savior of a new religion — one far better suited to empire than anything Jesus preached from a hillside in Galilee.

None of this is to say Jesus was good and Paul was bad. It is to say that the institution of Christianity was never built on the actual teachings of Jesus. It was built on a theological interpretation of Jesus, developed by someone who never met him, optimized for a world of urban Gentiles and imperial infrastructure. The revolutionary is already becoming respectable before Constantine arrives. The emperor didn’t corrupt the church. He just completed the work Paul started.

Constantine Didn’t Convert to Christianity — Christianity Converted to Empire

In 313 CE, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, granting Christians religious tolerance across the Roman Empire. The church remembers this as a moment of liberation — the persecuted community finally free to worship openly. What actually happened was more consequential and far less flattering. Christianity didn’t just gain tolerance. It gained a patron, and patrons always have expectations.

By 325 CE, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea to resolve theological disputes that were fracturing his empire. Note what is happening here: an emperor is summoning bishops to settle questions of doctrine.

The authority to define orthodox Christianity flows not from the teachings of a peasant rabbi but from the political needs of a Roman emperor who needed a unified religion for a unified empire.

As one historian put it, the age of Christian emperors was an age of creeds, and creeds were the instruments of conformity. The Nicene Creed is not a grassroots confession of faith hammered out by communities discerning together. It is state doctrine, enforced by imperial power, with dissenters exiled.

The theological architecture built at Nicaea didn’t just define what Christians believed — it defined who had authority, who was heretical, and crucially, who had the backing of the state. Eusebius of Caesarea, the imperial court’s favorite bishop, essentially invented Christian political theology to justify the arrangement. In his writings, Constantine is portrayed as a divinely ordained ruler — a “delegate of the Supreme” and “interpreter of the Word of God” — and the Roman Empire itself as the earthly fulfillment of God’s kingdom. He practically convicts himself. This is not the theology of someone trying to renew a Jewish peasant movement. This is the theology of someone building an imperial religion from the ground up.

The template Eusebius established proved extraordinarily durable. Church authority and state power would remain fused — sometimes contentiously, always consequentially — for the next seventeen centuries. Crusades launched with papal blessing. Inquisitions backed by royal force. The church didn’t just benefit from empire. It became empire’s most effective legitimating institution, providing the sacred story that made conquest feel like providence. The emperor’s chaplain had found his permanent office.

The New World as Proof of Concept

When Christopher Columbus made landfall in 1492, he did not arrive alone. The cross and the sword traveled together — this was not incidental, it was constitutional.

The Doctrine of Discovery, a legal and theological framework built on a series of papal bulls issued in the 15th century, declared that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed, conquered, and exploited by European powers. The church did not merely bless this arrangement. It authored it.

Colonial conquest was not something Christianity was recruited to justify after the fact. It was something Christianity provided the ideological architecture for in advance.

In North America, the same logic produced the Indian boarding school system, explicitly designed, in the words of its architect Richard Henry Pratt, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” These were not fringe operations. They were funded by the federal government and run predominantly by Christian denominations — Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal.

The goal was civilizational erasure dressed in the language of salvation. To be saved was to be made white, English-speaking, and Christian.

The three were functionally synonymous. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in her essential history of the United States, shows how this was not a corruption of the American Christian project but its fullest expression — the missionary impulse and the colonial impulse were always the same impulse. This definition of salvation is still alive and well today. In my own social networks I regularly come across Pro-Trump Latinos, Mexican-Americans working their hardest to emphasize their American while rewriting or ignoring their Mexican. Call them Spanish, Texican, or Hispanic, anything but Mexican. Their American-ness is confirmed by their embrace of white culture, white values, and more often than not, a nationalist Christianity that has no room for the Mexico their families came from.

Manifest Destiny was theology before it was policy. The phrase itself, coined in 1845, was saturated in providential language — God had ordained Anglo-Protestant civilization to spread from sea to sea, and anyone standing in the way was standing against divine will. This is Eusebius in a new world. The logic is identical: empire and church as co-heirs of God’s plan for history, conquest reframed as providence, violence sanctified by doctrine. American Christianity did not import this logic from a corrupted European church and then try to do better. It inherited the logic, refined it, and put it to work on a continental scale.

The Revolutionary Jesus Was Always a Cover Story

Christianity has always produced reformers. It cannot seem to help itself. From the Anabaptists of the 16th century who rejected state churches and refused to bear arms, to the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century that tried to aim the institution at poverty and inequality, to the liberation theologians of Latin America who read the Gospel as a mandate for revolution, the history of Christianity is littered with movements that looked at the institution and said: this is not what Jesus meant. They were right. And they all failed to change it in any fundamental way.

This is not a coincidence. It is a diagnosis.

The reform impulse keeps returning because the gap between what Christianity claims to be and what it actually is remains undeniable to anyone paying attention.

But reformers almost universally make the same mistake: they assume the institution was built on the teachings of Jesus and has since been corrupted, and that the task is to strip away the corruption and recover the original. What this piece has tried to show is that there is no original to recover.

The institution was not corrupted. It was constructed — by Paul for the Greco-Roman world, completed by Constantine for the Roman Empire, and exported by European powers to every continent they colonized. The revolutionary Jesus was always the alibi, not the architect.

This is what makes Christian nationalism in its current American form so clarifying. When Donald Trump held a Bible aloft in front of a church cleared by tear gas, the outrage from mainstream Christians missed the point entirely. They saw desecration. What they were actually watching was the mask coming off — the imperial character of the institution made visible without the usual theological dressing. Christian nationalism did not corrupt American Christianity. It just stopped being polite about what American Christianity has always been: the sacred language of empire, the liturgy of conquest, the chaplaincy of power.

The reformers will keep coming. Some of them will be admirable people doing genuine good in the world. But as long as they are trying to reform an institution back toward something it was never built to be, they are not solving the problem. They are providing the institution with its most useful alibi of all — the proof that it contains multitudes, that it can self-correct, that the revolutionary Jesus is still in there somewhere, waiting to be recovered. He isn’t. He can’t be. Because he was never part of the system. He was a Jewish peasant reformer who never intended any of this. The institution built in his name has known that from the beginning. The rest of us are only now catching up.

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For years, the pro-life movement told us they were the last line of defense for the vulnerable. They are evangelicals who represented Christianity as a voting bloc, “The Moral Majority.” They fought for the unborn, rallied against trafficking, and built an entire political theology around the idea that a godless elite was preying on children — and only their guy could stop it.

Then the Epstein files started coming out… and their guy’s name was in them. Suddenly, the mask came off. According to PRRI, only 9% of white evangelical Protestants view the Epstein files as a critical issue. Nine percent — for the largest child sex trafficking case in modern American history.

So let’s cut through the noise and talk plainly about what the Epstein Files are and what they’re really about — because underneath the political theater, there’s a story about how wealth and power shield the worst kinds of exploitation from consequences. And for those paying attention, the Epstein Files are also exposing how Christian Nationalism is a deep moral rot that outwardly claims to be fighting for exactly this kind of accountability while simultaneously being the cover that enables it.

Who Was Jeffrey Epstein?

Jeffrey Epstein was a wealthy financier who trafficked and sexually abused dozens — likely hundreds — of girls and young women over the course of decades. The FBI identified at least 34 confirmed underage victims in its initial investigation. Investigative reporting by the Miami Herald later identified around 80. A recent DOJ review found over 1,200 victims or family members referenced in its files.

He operated through a network that included his Manhattan mansion, a ranch in New Mexico, a private island in the US Virgin Islands (known as “Epstein Island”), and private jets. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell recruited and groomed many of the victims. She was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021 and is currently serving 20 years in federal prison.

Strip away the financial jargon and social prestige, and Epstein was running a sex trafficking operation that catered to wealthy and powerful men. His connections spanned the political spectrum, but what's particularly damning for the Christian Right is how deeply his network overlaps with the MAGA world they've sanctified.

Donald Trump — their divinely chosen leader — appears throughout the files, including an email where Epstein claimed Trump "knew about the girls." Steve Bannon, the chief architect of MAGA's political strategy, exchanged hundreds of texts and emails with Epstein and was filming a documentary to rehabilitate his image. Elon Musk asked Epstein in a 2012 email about "the wildest party" on his island. Alexander Acosta, Trump's Labor Secretary, gave Epstein the sweetheart plea deal that let him walk. Kenneth Starr — the evangelical hero who led the Clinton impeachment — served on Epstein's legal team before resigning from Baylor University over its mishandling of sexual assault cases. And beyond the files themselves, Pete Hegseth, Trump's current Secretary of Defense, attends a church aligned with the TheoBros, a Christian nationalist network whose leaders have actively defended Trump on the Epstein issue. None of these individuals has been charged with crimes related to Epstein's abuse, and several have denied knowledge of it. But the pattern of proximity cannot be ignored.

Epstein died in a federal jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial. His death was officially ruled a suicide. Many people — across the political spectrum — don’t believe that. In its simplest terms, Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘pimp for the ruling class.’

What Are the Epstein Files?

The “Epstein files” refer to millions of documents, images, and videos collected as evidence across multiple criminal investigations, which include:

• A Florida case

• A New York federal case

• he Ghislaine Maxwell prosecution

• Investigations into Epstein’s death

• Various FBI inquiries.

We’re talking about over 300 gigabytes of data: contact books, flight logs, emails, photos, financial records, witness interviews, and internal government communications.

In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with near-unanimous bipartisan support, and Trump signed it into law. The act required the Department of Justice to release all unclassified records within 30 days. Since then, approximately 3.5 million pages have been released, along with over 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.

The much-discussed “Epstein list” — a supposed master document naming clients he trafficked girls to — doesn’t appear to exist as a single document. In July 2025, the DOJ released a memo stating that no such list was found and no credible evidence supported claims that Epstein ran a blackmail operation. That conclusion has been met with widespread skepticism.

How Wealth Bought Impunity

Here’s where the story stops being about one man’s crimes and starts being about a system.

In 2007, after Palm Beach police investigated Epstein and the FBI compiled a 53-page draft indictment, federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta negotiated what has been called “one of the most lenient plea deals in American legal history”.

Instead of facing federal sex trafficking charges that could have put him away for life, Epstein pleaded guilty to state-level prostitution charges. He served 13 months in a county jail with work-release privileges that let him leave the facility for up to 12 hours a day.

The deal also granted immunity to unnamed co-conspirators — meaning anyone else involved in his operation was shielded from prosecution too.

A prosecutor who actually saw the evidence drafted a 53-page indictment. Her superiors buried it. The victims weren’t even told about the plea deal until it was already done — a violation of federal law. This is what class impunity looks like in practice: the people closest to the truth get overruled, the victims get cut out, and the powerful get immunity clauses written into the deal that protect not just the predator but everyone in his orbit.

Think about what that sequence reveals. A man abuses dozens of underage girls. The evidence is overwhelming. A prosecutor drafts a federal indictment. And then, somehow, the system produces an outcome where the abuser serves a little over a year in minimum security with day passes, his co-conspirators walk free, and his victims aren’t even told it happened.

The only difference between Jeffrey Epstein and the majority of people in America is that Epstein belonged to the wealthiest top 1%, which gave him access to resources the average person could never dream of. Let me state it plainly: Epstein's ace in the hole was money and connections.

But there’s another layer to this story—one that reveals how a religious movement claiming to fight trafficking became complicit in protecting a trafficker. This is where the story gets even more revealing.

The Christian Nationalist Contradiction

For years, the Christian Right and the broader MAGA movement made child trafficking a centerpiece of their moral crusade. QAnon narratives about elite pedophile rings became gospel in evangelical circles. Trump was cast as the warrior who would expose the predators and bring them to justice. “Save the children” wasn’t just a slogan — it was woven into the theological framework that positioned Trump as a divinely chosen leader, a modern-day King David sent by God to fight evil.

Then the Epstein files started coming out, and Trump’s name was in them.

The response from Christian nationalist leaders has been a masterclass in selective morality. When Attorney General Pam Bondi — who initially promised on Fox News to release the Epstein files — reversed course after briefing Trump that his name appeared alongside “unverified hearsay,” the movement that had spent years demanding transparency suddenly found reasons to support secrecy.

Lance Wallnau, one of the most influential figures in the New Apostolic Reformation movement, told his followers that “Trump was acting in the country’s best interest by not releasing the files”. Trump himself told people to stop talking about Epstein.

Among white evangelicals who view Trump favorably, 67% approve of how he’s handled the Epstein files — compared to just 8% of those with unfavorable views. The movement that built its brand on protecting children is overwhelmingly fine with its leader slow-walking accountability for the largest modern child sex trafficking network.

Christian nationalism uses 'protecting children' as a tool to gain power, not as a consistent moral principle. The movement holds ordinary people to strict standards while making endless exceptions for leaders who support their political agenda. When 67% of white evangelicals who favor Trump approve of his Epstein files handling while only 8% of those who don't favor him do the same, we're not seeing a disagreement about child protection. We're seeing a movement where the leader's perceived political utility determines which moral standards apply.

Why Accountability Still Matters

Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. So why does any of this still matter?

Because the system that enabled him hasn’t changed. Only one person has ever been criminally charged in connection with Epstein’s trafficking operation. Despite flight logs, witness testimony, photographs, and communications linking numerous powerful individuals to Epstein’s world, no one else has faced charges.

Meanwhile, the file releases themselves have compounded the injustice. The DOJ accidentally exposed the identities of nearly 100 victims in the January 2026 release — the very people the law was supposed to protect. Survivors have described inconsistent redactions that shield the names of powerful associates while failing to protect victims. As one survivor put it: “Publishing images of victims while shielding predators is just a failure of complete justice.”

The Epstein case isn’t an anomaly. It’s a case study in how class power operates. When you have enough money, the legal system doesn’t function the same way for you. Prosecutors negotiate with your high-powered attorneys instead of advocating for your victims. Investigations stall. Evidence gets sealed. Plea deals get sweetened. Co-conspirators get immunity. And when the whole thing finally becomes too public to ignore, the response is managed disclosure — just enough transparency to look like accountability, carefully redacted to protect the people who matter.

And when you add a religious movement willing to provide moral cover for that power? The impunity becomes nearly total.

The victims — many of whom were teenagers from vulnerable backgrounds when they were exploited — deserve a system that prioritizes their justice over the comfort of the powerful and the political convenience of those who claim to speak for God. Until that changes, the Epstein files aren’t just a scandal. They’re an indictment of the system that protected a predator, of the institutions that continue to shield his associates, and of the Christian nationalist movement that chose power over the vulnerable it claimed to protect.

Sally is a single mother who relies on food stamps and Medicaid. She doesn’t pay income tax because she doesn’t earn enough to owe any. She relies on government programs to feed her child and keep them healthy. Sally is a welfare queen. At least, that’s what politicians would call her. She’s exactly the kind of person politicians have been telling you to resent for the last fifty years—the one living off your hard-earned tax dollars, the drain on the system, the reason your paycheck doesn’t go as far as it should.

Here’s what most politicians and political pundits don’t tell you about Sally’s life.

She wakes up at 5:30 AM to get her daughter ready for school before her shift at Walmart starts. She’s worked there for years now—full-time, never missed a day she didn’t have to. She stocks shelves, helps customers find what they need, and covers when coworkers call in sick. She does everything she’s been told a “good worker” should do.

And she still can’t afford groceries.

That’s why Sally uses food stamps. Not because she’s lazy—she works forty hours a week. Not because she’s gaming the system—she qualifies because her paycheck simply doesn’t cover rent and food and keeping the lights on. Not because she wants to—she’d rather earn enough to skip the nervous anxiety that pulses through her body every time she swipes an EBT or debit card because she isn’t certain there’s enough funds for the transaction to go through.

Sally is exactly the kind of person you’ve been told to resent. The welfare recipient. The one “living off your tax dollars” while you work hard for your money. She’s the modern version of the woman Ronald Reagan spent the 1970s warning America about. The one driving her Cadillac to the welfare office to pick up her government check.

Here’s the thing we were never told:

Sally isn’t the welfare queen in this story. Walmart is.

Every month, Sally receives around $200 in SNAP benefits to feed her daughter. Every month, her daughter gets healthcare through Medicaid because Walmart's insurance costs more than Sally can afford on her wages. Every month, taxpayers cover the gap between what Walmart pays Sally and what it actually costs to survive—while also handing Walmart billions in tax breaks, grants, and subsidies for being such a generous "job creator.

Corporate Exploitation of Taxpayers

In 2024, Walmart’s profits exceeded five billion dollars in a single quarter. CEO Doug McMillon’s compensation that same year? $27.4 million. And the amount of public assistance Walmart’s employees require because the company won’t pay living wages? An estimated $6.2 billion annually. Walmart could pay every single employee a living wage and still walk away with billions in profit—they just choose not to.

We’ve been paying Walmart’s payroll. They just convinced you to blame Sally for cashing the check.

The real welfare queen never drove a Cadillac. She flew private jets, built distribution centers with your tax dollars, and paid her executives millions while we subsidized her workers’ groceries. The real welfare queen is named Walmart. And McDonald’s. And Amazon. And every other billion-dollar corporation that’s been feeding at the public trough for decades while pointing at people like Sally and calling them parasites.

Walmart isn’t some rogue bad actor breaking the rules of capitalism. This is the rule. Across every sector of the American economy, profitable corporations have perfected a simple con: pay workers poverty wages, let taxpayers cover the difference, then point at those workers and call them the problem. It’s not a bug in the system—it’s the entire business model.

Corporate Welfare’s Greatest Hits

McDonald’s had nearly 9,000 workers receiving food stamps across nine states, according to a 2020 government study. The company reported net income of $1.76 billion that quarter. Their executives earned millions. Their workers qualified for Medicaid. We paid the difference.

Amazon, now one of the world’s most valuable companies, had over 4,000 employees on SNAP benefits. Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man while Amazon workers in multiple states required public assistance to survive. The company that delivers everything to your door couldn’t deliver living wages to the people making it possible. Taxpayers covered their payroll costs instead.

Dollar stores—both Dollar General and Dollar Tree—consistently rank among the top employers of SNAP and Medicaid recipients. These chains have exploded across America, particularly in low-income communities, paying wages so low that their own workers can’t afford to shop anywhere else without government assistance. It’s a closed loop: your tax dollars subsidize their workers, who then spend those dollars at the same stores, refusing to pay them fairly.

The total bill for corporate America’s wage theft from taxpayers is staggering. A single 200-employee Walmart requires an estimated $420,000 in annual taxpayer subsidies for employee assistance programs—housing support, food aid, healthcare, and educational services. Multiply that across thousands of stores, and you begin to see the scale of the con. Federal business subsidies reached $181 billion in 2024, with an estimated $6.2 billion of that going just to cover the gap between what major retailers pay and what their workers need to survive.

What makes this truly obscene is that these same corporations also receive billions in direct subsidies—tax breaks, grants, and sweetheart deals from local governments desperate to attract jobs. Jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Jobs that require public assistance. Jobs that transfer wealth from your pocket to their shareholders.

This is the System’s Design

This isn’t a failure of capitalism. It’s capitalism working exactly as intended.

The system requires an exploited underclass—workers who have no choice but to accept poverty wages because the alternative is homelessness and starvation. Let’s be clear, the exploited underclass is the vast majority of working people. Regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation, the system is an equal opportunity exploiter.

Corporations know this. They build entire business models around it. Pay workers just enough that they can’t quite quit, but not enough that they can actually live. Let the government pick up the slack. Pocket the difference as profit. Reward executives for “keeping costs down.” Repeat.

This is why they fight minimum wage increases so viciously. It’s why they union-bust and threaten to close stores when workers try to organize. It’s why they lobby for cuts to social programs while simultaneously depending on those programs to subsidize their payroll. They need us desperate enough to accept whatever they offer, but not so desperate that we can’t show up to work.

For the system to thrive, it needs us to be angry and to point fingers at the wrong people.

That’s where the “welfare queen” myth becomes essential.

• If we’re busy resenting Sally for using food stamps, we’re not asking why Walmart’s CEO needs $27 million while his workers need Medicaid.

• If we’re mad at poor people for “not working hard enough,” we’re not noticing that full-time work doesn’t pay enough to survive.

• If we’re convinced the problem is government handouts, we won’t question why corporations get billions in subsidies while workers get blamed for needing help.

Capitalism requires exploitation. It requires some people to profit enormously from other people’s labor while paying them as little as possible. The “welfare queen” myth exists to make sure we blame the workers for being exploited instead of the corporations doing the exploiting.

Another Way Is Possible

The solution isn’t complicated. There are multiple ways that we can ensure everyone has enough to live on.

A living wage—currently around $25 per hour nationally—would mean workers like Sally could afford rent, groceries, and healthcare without relying on government assistance. It would mean corporations actually pay for the labor they profit from instead of outsourcing that cost to taxpayers. It’s not radical. It’s basic math.

End corporate welfare. Those $181 billion in annual business subsidies? That money could fund universal healthcare, free childcare, or infrastructure that actually serves communities instead of padding corporate balance sheets. Stop giving tax breaks to profitable corporations that turn around and pay poverty wages. Make them contribute to the communities they extract wealth from.

Support worker cooperatives. Imagine if Sally and her coworkers owned Walmart together. Profits would be shared among the people doing the work instead of funneled to executives and shareholders. Decisions about wages and benefits would be made democratically by workers who understand what it costs to survive because they’re living it. Worker cooperatives prove it’s possible—they exist right now, operating successfully while prioritizing people over profit.

Establish a universal basic income. A foundation of economic security that isn’t tied to employment would fundamentally shift the power dynamic. Workers wouldn’t have to accept poverty wages out of desperation. They could say no to exploitation. They could organize without fear of losing everything. UBI recognizes that in the wealthiest nation in history, no one should have to choose between feeding their children and paying rent.

Picture Sally’s life under these conditions. She wakes up at 5:30 AM—but this time, her wages cover groceries without government assistance. She and her coworkers own a stake in the business they build with their labor every day. She has healthcare that doesn’t depend on her employer’s goodwill. She has economic security that lets her save for her daughter’s future instead of just surviving week to week. She has the power to say no to exploitation because she’s not desperate. Her mental health improves because she’s not worried about her check stretching a full two weeks or how she’ll pay for an ER visit if her child breaks a limb on the playground. Her physical health also increases as she and her daughter can afford better quality meals. She’s not a welfare queen. She’s not a cautionary tale. She’s a person like you and me striving to contribute while having the opportunity to live with dignity.

That hope is not a fantasy. It’s what happens when we stop using our tax dollars to subsidize billionaire welfare queens and start investing in people.

Imagine Jesus approaching someone and saying, "I love you so much I've come to save you."

The person asks, "Save me from what?"

Jesus replies, "From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me save you."

Read that again. Would you call that love? Or would you call it what it actually is—a threat?

This is the gospel I was raised on. God loves you unconditionally, the church said—but there's a condition: believe, or burn. Choose Jesus, or face eternal conscious torment. Maybe if you're lucky, your church taught eternal conscious torment until God annihilates you at some undetermined point in the future. It's salvation with a hell-sized gun to your head, God's grace wrapped in coercion.

The moment I recognized this paradox, everything else about Christianity started to collapse. The history of missionaries arriving with the conquistadors. The hellfire sermons and rapture stories are designed to terrify children into compliance. The churches that turned political litmus tests into measures of faith. This lethal combination shattered whatever faith I had in Christianity's God and the institutions promoting this deity.

When I finally walked away, it wasn't a crisis of belief—it was the opposite. I was choosing integrity over fear. And what I discovered on the other side was anarchism. Not the popular misconception of anarchism as chaos and violence, but anarchism as Merriam-Webster defines it:

"a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association."

A worldview that rejects all hierarchies built on domination, including the religious one my family walked away from.

Christianity Spread Through Conquest, Not Conversion

Growing up, I was taught the 'missional' story about God's adventure to save the world through the spread of Christianity. Missionaries, like William Carey, Hudson Taylor, and Elizabeth Elliot, traveled the world out of love, sharing the good news of Jesus with people who desperately needed to hear it. The narrative emphasized how Christianity grew organically from a room of scared disciples into a global movement, spreading from heart to heart through the compelling power of faith alone.

That story is a lie.

Christianity didn't spread primarily through persuasion—it spread through conquest. And the missionaries often arrived alongside the conquistadors, blessing the violence in the name of God.

For example, as an American of Mexican descent, the story of Christianity for my ancestors is horrifying. In 1492, when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, Catholic missionaries followed. Pope Alexander VI made this partnership official in 1493, issuing a decree that literally divided the "New World" between Spain and Portugal—on the condition that they spread Christianity. This wasn't charity. This was conquest with a cross.

The Spanish implemented the encomienda system, forcing Indigenous people into brutal labor under the pretense of "religious instruction." Missionaries didn't gently invite people into faith—they arrived to pacify populations for resource extraction. Indigenous peoples were stripped of their languages, spiritual practices, and ways of life through forced conversion. This wasn't a few bad actors perverting an otherwise peaceful mission. This was the church system working alongside the state to exploit 'unreached' people exactly as designed.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar who witnessed the colonization firsthand, documented in 1542 how conquistadors subjected Indigenous peoples to 'bloody slaughter and destruction' while missionaries participated in what Spaniards called 'the Spiritual Conquest'—violent suppression of what they labeled heresy and idolatry.

This behavior isn't simply historical; it's still happening today. According to a 2020 Reuters investigation, American evangelical organizations have funneled more than $280 million into anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns in Africa since 2007. U.S. evangelical activists directly shaped Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for being gay. Contemporary missions still carry colonialism's DNA—the assumption that Western Christianity must be imposed on the Global South.

When I learned this history, I couldn't unsee the atrocities. I also had to reconcile with my own gullibility and trust in what I realized was Christian propaganda masked as history. Christianity didn't conquer the world through the compelling beauty of Jesus's teachings. It conquered through violence, coercion, and the marriage of religious authority with imperial power. The gospel spread at the point of a sword far more often than through the transformation of a heart.

And the church has spent centuries pretending otherwise.

"Love" That Threatens Isn't Love—It's Coercion

The doctrine of hell was my first crack in the foundation. I remember being taught that God loves me unconditionally—but in the same breath, being told that rejecting that love meant eternal conscious torment. Fire and suffering without end. No possibility of redemption, no second chances, just an eternity of agony because I made the wrong choice in the few decades I had on earth.

That's not love. That's a threat.

Imagine someone telling you they love you, but if you don't love them back, they'll lock you in their basement and torture you forever. What would we call that behavior? We'd call that abuse. How would we describe the person making such threats? We'd call them psychopathic. But when God does it? That's supposed to be grace.

The psychology is deliberate. It's used masterfully in all high-control religious institutions and cults, for that matter. The threat of hell functions as social control—it motivates church attendance, tithes, and evangelism. Fear keeps people from leaving even when they have serious doubts. Children are especially vulnerable to this manipulation. Kids struggle with enough fear and shame at the thought of being on Santa's naughty list. How much worse is it when they are threatened with God's eternal judgment list that doesn't come with a lump of coal, but their flesh burning for all eternity?

This creates lasting damage. Psychologist Marlene Winell, who coined the term Religious Trauma Syndrome, notes that hell indoctrination in childhood can create neural patterns that persist for years or even a lifetime despite rational analysis. Research documents how people who leave Christianity experience intrusive thoughts about damnation, panic attacks triggered by religious imagery, and the persistent fear that "What if they're right?" even decades after walking away. Therapist Andrew Jasko explains that when children are taught to fear eternal torture, it alters psychology at fundamental levels, "hardwiring" fear responses that logic alone can't dislodge.

Let's be clear, churches know fear is a hell of a motivator. Make no mistake, congregations benefit immensely from promoting hell—it fills pews and collection plates. The doctrine creates a captive audience too terrified to question, too afraid to walk away. It breeds hubris by creating an in-group and an out-group. The insiders are those smart enough to have chosen Jesus, while everyone else awaits their just punishment. The paradox is, they package this coercion in the language of love and grace, making it nearly impossible to name the manipulation without being accused of rebelling against God himself.

As if hell isn't bad enough, Christianity ratchets up the stakes through the doctrine of original sin. From birth, you're told you're inherently broken, condemned by default, incapable of saving yourself. So all humanity starts life doomed to hell.

Of course, as providence would have it, the same institution that created the doctrine—the church—is also the one that controls the only cure for the disease. It's the ultimate protection racket: create the problem, offer the solution, and threaten consequences for refusing.

Maybe your church is one of the few that tweaked the original sin recipe. Instead of every human being being born damned to hell, they taught the concept of "the age of innocence." The age differs from church to church, but essentially, from birth until a specific age, children are not seen as rebellious sinners in the eyes of God. This creates a loophole to justify babies and children who die young, avoiding hell.

However, it also creates situations like those of Andrea Yates, where a mother's fear of hell and disappointing God so overwhelmed her that she thought the most loving thing she could do for her five children was drown them so they would be guaranteed entrance to heaven.

Once I saw this pattern, I couldn't unsee it. The foundation wasn't love—it was fear. And I was done living that way. But it would take one more betrayal—this time from the community itself—before I finally walked away.

The Community That Chose Nationalism Over Christ

The final break came when I realized my church wasn't following Christ—they were following Trump.

By 2024, the lines were clear. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that 71% of white evangelical Christians believed God played a role in Trump's 2024 election victory. In many congregations, supporting Trump isn't just politics—it is a litmus test for faith itself. If you question his policies, his character, or his obvious contempt for the vulnerable, you aren't just wrong politically. You were spiritually suspect. The irony is insane: "You're questioning Trump—do you even know Jesus?"

My family experienced this firsthand. Even when churches didn't explicitly condone Trump or Trumpism, they were wholesale operating out of the underlying ideology that makes someone like Trump attractive to begin with. When we called out spiritual abuse in our church leadership, the response was always authoritarian. Be quiet, fall in line, or get out.

When we questioned why "loving your neighbor" meant seeing people of different races and classes hold the same values as upper-class white people, we were treated as radical and a threat. When we refused to equate unquestioned loyalty to church leadership with Christian faithfulness, the response wasn't dialogue or concern—it was gaslighting. Church leaders questioned whether we were really saved. Friends we'd worshiped with for years pulled away. The message was unmistakable: fall in line or get out.

We chose to get out.

What broke me wasn't just the Trump worship and unquestioning of the systems that allow people like him to thrive—it was watching people who claimed to follow the "Prince of Peace" embrace cruelty as strength, greed as wisdom, and dominance as godliness. They traded the Sermon on the Mount for power. They chose the empire over the gospel. And when we pointed it out, they didn't defend their theology. They defended their tribe.

This isn't a bug in the system. It's how the system is designed. Christianity has always been most comfortable when aligned with power—whether that's Roman emperors, European monarchs, or American presidents. The religion that claims to liberate actually teaches obedience to authority, submission to hierarchy, and fear of questioning those in charge. It's built to manufacture compliant subjects, not free people.

That's when I understood: if this is what Christianity produces, I want no part of it.

From Deconstruction to Anarchism: Solidarity, Not Hierarchy

The struggle is real, and hooks were in deep. I tried to fight and stay within Christianity. I even tried to find a niche within another Abrahamic religion. Being a Christian—being a man of religious faith—was my entire identity. I eventually realized I wouldn't heal by placing different brands of religious bandages on my wounds. I needed to remove the bandages altogether. So I did.

Walking away from Christianity wasn't a loss—it was liberation. For me, my wife, and our children, leaving meant reclaiming our integrity, our curiosity, and our capacity to question authority without fear of eternal consequences.

My deconstruction led me to anarchism, a framework that rejects all hierarchies built on coercion, including religious ones. Noam Chomsky offers a simple definition:

"As far as I can see, it's just the point of view that says that people have the right to be free, and if there are constraints on that freedom then you've got to justify them."

This simple standard exposes Christianity's core problem. Christianity couldn't justify its constraints. The threat of hell, the demand for obedience, the concentration of power in church leadership—none of it could be defended on grounds other than "because God said so." That's not justification. It's capitulation to an illegitimate authority.

Anarchism showed me what Christianity promised but never delivered: a world organized around mutual aid instead of hierarchy, cooperation instead of coercion, solidarity instead of salvation. No one gets left behind because they asked the wrong questions, loved the wrong people, or failed to pledge loyalty to the right leader.

What surprised me was how naturally anarchism aligned with Zen practice. Both reject rigid hierarchies and fixed dogmas. Both emphasize direct experience over blind belief. Both understand that liberation comes through questioning, not submission. Zen taught me to sit with uncertainty without needing cosmic reassurance. Anarchism taught me to organize with others without needing cosmic permission. Together, they offer something Christianity never could: freedom grounded in this world, with these people, right now.

I don't need heaven to justify treating people with dignity. I don't need hell to understand that cruelty is wrong. I don't need a hierarchical god to know that power concentrates in the hands of the few and exploits the many. I can see it. We all can.

If you're questioning the faith you were raised in, if the contradictions are becoming impossible to ignore, if the fear is starting to feel more like control than love—trust that instinct. Walking away isn't rebellion. It's integrity. And on the other side of that fear is a world where solidarity replaces hierarchy, where freedom replaces coercion, and where we build the beloved community together, without gods or masters.

Hey Rebel is supported by mutual aid sustainers, not paywalls. If you have the means and want to keep this work accessible for everyone, consider contributing on Ko-fi. Solidarity means no one gets left behind.

On November 28th, 2025, workers across more than 30 countries walked out of Amazon warehouses on Black Friday, demanding dignity. At the same time, Jeff Bezos's personal fortune was estimated between $234 and $254 billion dollars. Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk–three tech oligarchs-hold more personal wealth than the entire bottom 50% of the American population.

Same company. Same day. Two completely different realities. One for those who own, another for those who work.

This divide isn't new. It's as old as civilization itself. The master became the lord, and the lord became the employer. The plantation became the manor became the warehouse. But the fundamental relationship never changed: one group owns, one group works, and only one group decides where the wealth goes.

What Are We Looking At?

What are we looking at when we see Jeff Bezos's $234 billion next to workers across 30 countries struggling to put food on their tables? This is class struggle in its most visible form–not the Hollywood version with pitchforks, riots, and revolution, but the everyday economic reality that shapes the lives of billions of people.

Class struggle, at its core, is the conflict between those who own the means of production (e.g., equipment, tools, factories, warehouses, technology needed to make things) and those who must work for the owners of those means to survive. The owners are one class. The workers are another class. The struggle happens because the two groups have fundamentally opposing interests. Economist Dr. Richard D. Wolff describes the interest of owners this way:

"The greater the value added by the laborers and the smaller the portion returned to them as wages, the greater the surplus acquired by the capitalist." (Understanding Marxism, p. 42)

Said another way, the owners interest is to extract as much value as possible from the worker's labor while paying as little as possible. The worker, in contrast, wants fair compensation for the value they create and some control over their time and labor.

Here's a crucial point: this isn't about greedy bosses or bad individuals. When political conservatives and capitalism's defenders see inequality or exploitation, they're quick to blame it on a few bad apples. But inequality and exploitation aren't bugs in the system, they're features. When a small group controls the means of production and the majority must access those resources to earn a living, the natural outcome is an imbalance of power. The owner class holds all the leverage. They decide what gets produced, how it gets produced, who works and doesn't, and most importantly, what happens to the profits.

Lets revisit the Amazon workers who walked out on Black Friday. They're the ones packing boxes, printing shipping labels, loading trucks, managing inventories, doing the actual work that generates billions in revenue. But they have no say in how that revenue gets used. They don't decide their wages, working conditions, or whether the company should invest in automation that eliminates their jobs. Instead, its Jeff Bezos and the shareholders who make those decisions. Again, same labor creates the same value, but entirely different dynamics to power and wealth.

This brings us to the fundamental question that reveals class struggle across every economic system in history:

"Who owns what gets produced, and who decides what happens to it?"

The answer to that question determines who prospers, who struggles, who lives in security, and who lives paycheck to paycheck. Here's what's crazy, for thousands of years, across wildly different economic systems, the answer has remained essentially the same. A small ownership class controls production and decides distribution, while the working majority produces the goods but has little to no say in either.

The Evolution of Exploitation

The story of class struggle is one of evolution of exploitation. To understand this story, let's examine the three major economic systems of human society: slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. What we'll see is exploitation didn't disappear as societies 'progressed,' it just evolved better disguises.

Slavery: Total Ownership

During slavery, there was no pretense of freedom or choice. Masters owned both the means of production (land, tools, equipment), the producers (enslaved people), and everything that was produced. An unspoken reality around America's fast economic growth as a young country was the slave system. Through slavery, masters earned one hundred percent of the profits, only needing to pay for the upkeep of equipment and the bare minimum to keep slaves alive and working.

Here's how the exploitation worked: A slave's necessary labor is the portion of their work that produces value equivalent to their own subsistence, the food, shelter, and basics needed to survive and keep working. Everything beyond that is surplus labor, creating surplus value that fully belongs to the master. A slave might work twelve hours, with maybe three hours of labor covering their own survival and nine hours of pure profit for the master. Because slaves received no wages, it appeared as though masters were generously "providing" for them, when slaves were actually producing everything.

Feudalism: Owning the Land

When slavery's brutality became economically unsustainable and morally indefensible, the system evolved into feudalism. Feudalism promised a more humane arrangement but continued to deliver the same exploitation with a legal makeover. Lords didn't own the serf's bodies, but they owned something just as essential: the land. Serfs could live on the lord's land, farm it, and keep a portion of what they grew for their own subsistence, so long as they agreed to hand over all the surplus labor to the lord. Some serfs owed their lord a specific number of days of labor each week, working the lord's fields before they could work their own. Others paid in crops or goods.

The division was visible in a way slavery wasn't: three days for the lord then three days for yourself. This visibility was the disguise, it made the arrangement look like a fair exchange of protection and land access in return for labor. In reality, nothing fundamental had changed. The lord owned the means of production (the land), decided what happened to the surplus, and justified it all through claims of divine right. The serf had no choice but to accept the lord's terms or starve. Different contract, same power dynamic. The ownership class still extracted maximum value from the worker class.

Capitalism: The Freedom to Choose Your Boss

After the American and French Revolutions came capitalism, promising to finally break the pattern of exploitation. Capitalism appeared on the scene with the most compelling pitch yet: freedom. No more masters owning your body. No more lords owning your land. You could sell your labor to anyone, negotiate your wages, move freely, and switch from job to job. The chains were gone. The manor was gone. People were finally, truly free.

Except the answer to the fundamental question remained the same. Who owns what gets produced, and who decides what happens to it? Workers don't own the factories, the equipment, the technology, the means of production. Capitalists do. And capitalists still decide what happens to the surplus value created by workers. An Amazon warehouse worker might generate $100 of value per hour through their labor, but they're paid $18. Where does the other $82 go? Into profits for shareholders, executive compensation, expansion, decisions the worker had no part in making. The relationship is fundamentally identical to slavery and feudalism: those who do the work don't control what they produce or where the wealth goes. The only difference is now we call it a 'voluntary contract' instead of ownership.

Why This Pattern Matters And How We Break It

I can already hear defenders of capitalism pointing out the obvious: we're not slaves or serfs. We have labor laws, the freedom to quit. Those improvements matter. They were won through centuries of workers organizing and fighting. But the fundamental power dynamics remain the same. A small ownership class still controls the means of production while the worker class creates wealth with no say how it's distributed.

Each system claimed to be better than the one before. Feudal lords argued, "at least we don't own people!" Capitalists say, "you're free to choose your employer!" But that freedom is only the freedom to choose which capitalist exploits your labor, not freedom from exploitation itself. You're free to quit, to find another job where you still don't own what you produce, still don't participate in deciding what happens to profits, and still have no power beyond renting your labor or starving.

This is why people feel trapped even in good jobs. Your boss buys a vacation home or upgrades their existing home while you struggle to come up with next months rent. The company boasts record profits while your 2-5% raise doesn't cover inflation. The system is designed so the math never adds up in your favor. Those who own extract maximum value from those who work. That's not a bug, it's the same feature that's existed within every economic system.

The truth is this pattern isn't inevitable. Slavery seemed to be the only economic system until it wasn't. Feudalism seemed like the divine right of the few until it collapsed. Capitalism insists it's the "end of history," but it's not the best humanity can do, it's just the latest iteration of the same ancient theft. Breaking this pattern means those who do the work control what they produce. The Mondragon Corporation in Spain, a federation of worker cooperatives employing over 80,000 people, proves what's possible. The ration between highest and lowerst paid workers is capped at 6:1, compared to 670:1 within typical U.S. corporations. Worker cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid networks already exist, succeeding despite capitalism, proving a better way is possible.

The master became the lord became the capitalist. The plantation became the manor became the warehouse. But the fundamental relationship never changed. It won't change until we change it. Understanding this pattern is the first step. Building the alternative is the next.

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I remember holding my dad's hand, walking into our local Santikos theatre. I can still smell the buttery goodness of the popcorn and the sweat on the palms of my little hands. It was 1995, a weekend I was spending with my dad, and we were at the movies to see Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.

I was 9 years old and it was the first time I can remember going to the theatre to see a ‘scary movie.’ Though this was the first time I went to a theatre to see a horror film, it was a genre I was raised with since I could remember. As an even younger boy, I remember spending time at my aunt’s with my older brother and cousins while they watched Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Creep Show. Being afraid and learning to face my fear was something I had to learn from a young age.

Around the same time, my older brother took me to a re-release of The Exorcist in theatres. Watching Linda Blair projectile vomit and have her head spin was the first time I remember feeling genuine terror. Being exposed to such fear and horror at such a young age, with the two men in my life that I trusted, created both a healthy fear and a curiosity of all things ‘scary.’

Learning to See the Message Behind the Medium

Throughout my childhood and well into my teens, it was common for me to watch classic horror films from the 1970s and 80s. The more I watched horror movies, the less the films scared me. In many cases, the cheesy acting and over-the-top ways people met their demise became humorous.

An unforeseen consequence of no longer being afraid of horror movies was that I began to see that often the writer of the film was using the genre to make a deeper point. Using a non-horror example, I’ve loved the original Robocop since it first came out. Most people don’t realize that Robocop isn’t simply an '80s action movie about a cyborg police officer restoring peace to Detroit. Instead, the movie is a critique of Capitalism. The film highlights the danger of corporate power, systemic corruption, neoliberal ideology, dehumanization, and media manipulation.

The film was such a pointed critique of capitalism that director Paul Verhoeven saw RoboCop as;

“An 'American Jesus' narrative that exposes the brutal mechanisms of unchecked capitalism.” (Trickle Down Robonomics — The Predatory Capitalism of Robocop)

As a child, I didn’t intuitively pick up that Robocop was a social commentary against the danger of laissez-faire capitalism. I was able to pick up that the movie was telling a story beyond being good guys defeating bad guys, but it took time and knowledge to develop the language to understand the more profound message.

The Monster that Attacks from Outside

A friend of mine in my early twenties was a significant fan of Asian horror films. Specifically, they loved Korean and Japanese horror. Every Friday night, he would invite a group to check out the latest movies.

Maybe because there was a language and cultural barrier, but watching these movies was the first time I picked up that horror could also be a commentary on society. Analyzing movies to understand the deeper point or message led me to watch horror movies I was raised watching with a fresh perspective.

Ask any horror fan, any true horror fan, what are the scariest movies of the 1970s, and they’ll consistently tell you: Halloween, Jaws, and The Exorcist. Halloween is about a person born of pure evil growing up to be a psychopathic serial killer in a small midwestern town. Jaws is about an apex predator attacking families on Spring Break at a small town in New York. The Exorcist is about a girl in Washington, D.C. who becomes possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board.

On the surface, these films have little to nothing in common. However, when we consider the more profound social commentary driving the horror narratives, we see that the movies are actually ‘eerily’ similar.

At the root of all three movies is an outsider who enters into an ideal American environment and, through violence, threatens the ‘American way’ of life. Don’t believe me? Let me explain.

Michael Myers goes to Haddonfield, Illinois, which is quintessential small-town America. Everyone knows everyone, no one locks their doors, and our protagonist is Laurie Stroud, the model ‘girl next door.’ Everything in Haddonfield is picture-perfect Fall Americana. There are two-story homes in the suburbs, wide streets, perfect shades of orange, yellow, and brown, and pumpkins on every porch. Nothing can go wrong in a place like Haddonfield…Unless an outside threat, Michael Myers, were to come and jeopardize this utopia.

In Jaws, we get the ideal American vacation destination. A beautiful beach, hot dogs on the grill, beers and bonfires, and good, wholesome family fun. Again, it’s a snapshot of an American ideal where nothing could go wrong, unless an outside threat were to appear. Where the external threat in Haddonfield is Michael Myers to the community, in Jaws, it's a great white shark that found a buffet on Amity’s beaches.

With The Exorcist, it's Pazuzu, an ancient Mesopotamian demon that possesses a sweet young girl. In all three films, the threat is external. To vanquish the monster, it requires our protagonists to go into the dark unknown, risk their lives, and face the beast. Only when the monsters have been run out of town (or a little girl) can life return to normal.

All three of these movies align with the American narrative that the only threat that can endanger our way of life is the outsider or the ‘other.’ Whether it's Indigenous people that stand in the way of settler colonial expansion, African Americans fighting for freedom from chattel slavery, communism during the McCarthy, Cold War years, or immigrants and the ‘radical left’, the danger is always perceived as external.

The Real Threat comes from Within…

Ironically, the most horrifying movie of the 1970s is none of the ones discussed above. The scariest movie is actually The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

What makes this movie so terrifying is how it flips the belief that the threat to our way of life is an external one. You see, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the real danger doesn’t come from outside the community but from within. The antagonists in the film are the Sawyer Family, made up of a grandfather and his three grandsons. They’ve been residents in a small Texas town for generations. Where the family used to work in the industrial factories, they’ve all moved on, leaving the residents who couldn’t move with them living in squalor.

Grandpa Sawyer now runs a gas station that sells barbecue made of human flesh. One of his grandsons, known as Leatherface, butchers people with a chainsaw and uses the skin to create furniture (a la Ed Gein). As scary as the acts the family commits, the true terror is that the Sawyer family is as American as apple pie.

There isn’t anywhere to run from the Sawyers because they are one of us. In many ways, as more and more wealth and opportunity are concentrated in the hands of the few, we, the many, are the Sawyers.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t the only one highlighting the actual threat to our society, being an internal one. Today, films like Get Out, Us, Candyman, and Nope are director Jordan Peele’s picking up the mantel of using horror as social commentary.

With Halloween around the corner, the next time you sit down to watch a horror film, ask yourself: What is the true monster the director is trying to show me? The monster lurking in the shadows, or the smiling neighbor who waves while quietly resenting everything you represent? The demon that possesses the innocent, or the systems of power that devour communities while our leaders point fingers at borders and strangers? Horror is a unique medium that can use storytelling to show us our true monsters. The monsters that live among us don’t need to attack us from the shadows because we willingly subscribe to their podcasts, accept their selective memory as American history, and call their violence ‘manifest destiny’ and the will of God. The absolute terror isn’t that evil exists somewhere out there in the darkness. It’s that we’ve been living with it all along.

I turned 41 just over a month ago, and I've been stuck in a mental funk. After journaling, meditating, and processing my thoughts, I've realized that I'm distraught by the fact that profit-driven motivation primarily drives everything we do. The reason our primary motivation is to earn profit is that we live in a capitalist society that has permeated every crevice of Western civilization.

What increasingly angers me is how capitalism necessitates that the majority of people have to be exploited and dehumanized for capitalism to thrive. When I say capitalism, I'm describing the economic system of;

Private ownership and wage labor systematically exploit workers by concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a capitalist class, creating hierarchical structures that alienate laborers from the means of production and the value they create. This system fundamentally relies on state-backed property rights and market mechanisms that prioritize capital accumulation over human needs, perpetuating structural inequality and constraining individual and collective freedom.

You see, America's history of patriarchy, white supremacy, and exploitation is rooted in promoting the capitalist ideals of gaining wealth and power. Both of these ideals can only come at the cost of prioritizing profit over people, allowing one minority class to exploit the labor and resources of the majority, and dividing society into hierarchies.

Profit before People

Something as human as meeting a new person is, to some degree, driven by the potential to profit. One example is our society's obsession with placing people in mental hierarchies (more on this below) based on one's profession. We all do it even if it's subconsciously. Don't believe me that we're all guilty of this? Have you ever considered why, whenever meeting someone for the first time, it's normative to ask?

"What do you do for a living?"

We don't ask this to make small talk or get to know the person better; it's a way to size them up. To make a mental note of how they compare to you, the potential value you can gain from the relationship, and the worth of the conversation in terms of personal investment.

You see, the end goal within a capitalist society is to earn a profit. This goal isn't exclusive to the economy. Inevitably, every relationship and activity becomes about gaining leverage to earn another dollar.

For instance, for my generation and beyond (Gen Z and Gen A), we don't have hobbies anymore. Hobbies have been hijacked and, by and large, killed off by the 'side hustle.' I remember an Uncle who collected records when I was a kid, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Why did my Uncle collect records? He enjoyed music and loved connecting with like-minded people in the record-collecting community.

Today, if someone has what would historically be viewed as a hobby, there's the incessant pressure to monetize it. Are you into gaming? Start a Twitch channel and work to gain 50 followers so you can monetize. Enjoy photography? Start an Instagram account to grow your followers, and post on sites like Unsplash to earn money from your photos. Like writing? Start a Substack and create a subscription model to get paid for your work.

In capitalism, profit, the all-mighty dollar, is the only thing that matters. The cold reality is that profit comes before everything, including people. As a result, we are all stuck on the hamster wheel of proving our worth, every minute, of...every...day.

A System of Theft

This brings me to my next point. For the entirety of our adult lives, we are funneled into the grind of a 9-5. We are fed the belief that if we work hard for the next 5-6 decades, we will move up the corporate ladder, and as a result, we'll also move up in economic class.

I've been working in some capacity for the last 25 years, approximately half of my working life, and the reality is I'm barely keeping my head above water. Here's the thing: I have all the shit I was told I'm supposed to have, and none of it leads to a greater sense of satisfaction or purpose. I have a home, two cars, multiple college degrees, and a white collar career. All of these things are just hooks to keep me running harder on the hamster wheel.

This part of capitalism sucks, and I'm definitely not a fan, but it's not the worst part of the worker contract we all agree to when entering the workforce. Capitalism is built on the premise that there are owners and workers, who comprise two distinct classes of people. The goal within the market is for the owners, the minority group who possess the means of production, to earn as much profit as possible off the labor of the majority working class.

Most people don't realize how effed up of a social contract this actually is. Inherent to the owners' ability to maximize their profits is the need to exploit the working class. The logical question is, "How does the owner class steal from the working class?"

Wage theft: The biggest cost for a business outside of owning the resources for production (equipment, buildings, land, etc.) is paying employees. This means that to maximize their profits, owners will always strive to pay the workers less than their actual value. If owners paid workers what they are actually worth in terms of output, the owners wouldn't make a profit. And in capitalism, a company that doesn't show quarter-over-quarter profit increases is viewed as a bad business.

Not only are workers never paid their actual worth, but when a business earns a surplus of profit, it goes to the owner or shareholders, not the workers. Take this reality into account the next time you hear about whole generations of people 'quiet quitting' and being unwilling to go above and beyond to produce for their employer.

Society Built on Hierarchies

Finally, I am anti-capitalist because the system requires the economy and political structures of a society to be built on hierarchy. As discussed above, there has to be a group of owners who are always the minority group and a group of workers. The reason the owners need to be in the minority is that the more owners there are, the smaller the pool of workers becomes.

Understand the idea that hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is propaganda to keep the working class laboring harder and harder, like Boxer in George Orwell's Animal Farm. When a society's culture and politics are built on hierarchy, the downstream effect is that the society divides itself into a hierarchy.

So human beings cease to be equals. Instead, you have upper, middle, and lower class groups, including white-collar and blue-collar workers. Within America, we also create divisions based on factors such as sex, ethnicity, gender, and religion. For example, say two people work in the same industry and in the same position. A heterosexual white Christian man sits at the top of the social pyramid and will earn more income than his homosexual Latina Catholic woman co-worker.

The reasons the male worker is paid more than his female counterpart actually have nothing to do with their job skills or abilities. The distinction is all the result of imposed artificial power structures that elevate white Christian men to a higher place in society.

At the end of the day, hierarchies fundamentally limit human potential by creating artificial barriers between people.

This severely limits our natural human capacity for creativity, cooperation, and self-determination. Think of hierarchies like a rigid pyramid: information and decisions flow from top to bottom, but this inflexibility prevents the organic, peer-to-peer collaboration that humans naturally yearn for.

Whether government bureaucracies, corporate structures, or other institutional hierarchies, they equally organize society through control and authority rather than mutual understanding and voluntary cooperation. The result is a system that blocks genuine human connection and our innate ability to self-organize.

I hope to live in a way that embodies anti-capitalist ideals like democracy, equality, non-exploitation, and the removal of hierarchies. It's overwhelming because I recognize that, at best, I am only a drop of water needed to develop the hurricane of change necessary to create a more equitable society. I hope to empower and partner with other people who are striving to be drops of water.

Over the past six weeks, my social media engagement and personal communications have surged dramatically. Emails, texts, and messages from people I haven't heard from in years have flooded in—all triggered by my decision to share my family’s experience with spiritual abuse while attending Austin Stone Community Church in Austin, Texas, with the Bodies Behind the Bus Podcast.

Since I began speaking out, some of the backlash I’ve received is sad but not unexpected. Some individuals have accused me of using my story to build a platform, seek sympathy, or attract attention. The truth is, these past six weeks have been incredibly challenging. Some days I am filled with gratitude, hope, and encouragement. Other days, I grind my teeth, try not to have a panic attack, and struggle to even get out of bed.

My family couldn’t have known this back in 2022, but we’ve been able to handle the last six weeks fairly well, all things considered, and because of lessons learned from previous experiences with spiritual abuse. You see, in February of 2022, I joined the staff of a church where congregants were experiencing spiritual abuse and trauma at the hands of the pastor and elders. 

The Hope Community Church Disaster

In 2021, I joined the staff at Hope Community Church in Austin, which has since closed. From my first day on staff, multiple congregants reached out to express significant spiritual abuse involving the pastor, elders, and the pastor's wife. Congregants, already suffering and trying to speak out, but getting nowhere with leadership, sought my help after their attempts to address these issues internally failed. Despite my raising these concerns repeatedly, leadership dismissed them, gaslighting both me and the victims.

You can read more about what happened at Hope in this article, Conflict at diverse Austin church leads to claims of spiritual abuse reported on by Religious News Service. You can also read my timeline of the experience below:

My Experience of Spiritual Abuse as a Pastor at Hope Community Church

When I tried to hold leadership accountable, I was blindsided by attempts to terminate me. Eventually, I was given an ultimatum: conform to the pastor’s way or leave. I chose to leave, plunging my family into the darkest season of our lives.

The Personal Cost of Whistleblowing

The belief by some that sharing my most painful wounds inflicted by the Church is a strategy to elevate myself is beyond absurd. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. One person asked if I was speaking to Bodies Behind the Bus as a way to start my path back into ministry. That’s a hard no. 

Sadly, the reason anyone would think that whistleblowing would be a mechanism to build a platform, draw attention to myself, or ‘try to make a comeback’ is because this is behavior we’ve seen from countless ‘celebrity pastors.’ It’s tragic, it’s pathetic, and it is not something I have the least bit of interest in. 

Truth is, being a whistleblower is emotionally devastating. It comes with sleepless nights, guaranteed deconstruction, grief, and mourning. It’s worth noting this hasn’t simply been my experience. This is true for my family, who suffered immensely—my children were devastated to lose friends, and at times, even resented me for speaking out.

We lost nearly all our spiritual relationships. When I say ‘nearly’, I’m talking 99% of the relationships we had were gone overnight. As a former pastor, my entire social and professional circle was rooted in and connected to the church. This loss led to deep feelings of isolation, depression, stress, and anxiety.

I Don’t Regret Speaking Out and Would Do It Again

Despite the pain, I would do it all again. Speaking out against spiritual abuse is costly. Relationships are destroyed, reputations attacked, and personal experiences invalidated. Yet, it’s my conviction that speaking out against abuse of any kind is necessary. I’ve found the quote, often misattributed to Edmund Burke, especially powerful and encouraging to me:

“Evil wins when good people do nothing.” 

What sustained me was the support from fellow whistleblowers and my family’s improved emotional health. Unlike my isolated experience at Hope, my involvement with the Bodies Behind the Bus team provided a supportive network between myself and the other storytellers involved in the series, allowing us to lean on each other.

I’m genuinely so grateful for my wife, Angela, and our four kids, who have experienced every bit of heartache and pain with me. They are a source of strength that I couldn’t possibly live without. 

I’m also thankful to B, Ben, Kelley, Kenny, Johnna, and the Bodies Behind the Bus team. Each storyteller gave me hope, courage, strength, and the confidence that our stories together can make a meaningful difference. 

When folks reached out to Bodies Behind the Bus to attack me, Johnna and the team stood by me. They could have said my involvement would bring too much negative response to the series, or my story wasn’t worth sharing because of my previous involvement at Hope. But they didn’t. They did what few people in my four decades on this earth have done: they stood up for me and stood by me. For that, I am eternally grateful. 

Longing for Change to Come

Although Hope Community Church no longer exists, Austin Stone remains a large institution. However, our stories are empowering others to speak out and find the strength they may not have known they had. I’ve heard people thank us storytellers for giving them language to express their own painful experiences. We’ve had people openly share how, for the first time, they don’t feel alone in what they experienced. 

Allow me to say this plainly: speaking out about spiritual abuse is the worst. It results in deconstruction, depression, loneliness, anxiety, and stress. Yet, through the darkness, there is light. 

I no longer worry about whether people like me or believe me. I know the people who are truly for me because they have stood by my family and me for years. They are people like Jason and Bryn, Derek and Renee, Jochen and Blair, and others who have loved us not because we agree on a set of doctrines but simply for who we are. 

For that, I am profoundly grateful.

Yesterday, my experience at the Austin Stone was shared on the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast. The interview offers a sobering look at how spiritual abuse manifests in evangelical institutions. My experience at "The Stone" reveals the subtle yet devastating ways religious authority can be weaponized to control, marginalize, and harm congregants and staff members.

The Hidden Reality of Spiritual Abuse

I shared my experience during my approximately 8 years at the Austin Stone, including my early motivations for moving to Austin, the challenges I faced as a Mexican American in a predominantly white evangelical institution, and the barriers to leadership I encountered despite my qualifications. I discussed my experience raising support, internal cultural tensions, tokenism, health struggles tied to workplace stress, and the events that led to my departure from the staff. The interview highlights systemic issues within church leadership structures, particularly in relation to race, power, and access.

Tragically, my story illuminates a troubling pattern:

the leadership of The Austin Stone is complicit in creating a culture that allowed former pastor Aaron Ivey to commit abuse against at least four males and demonstrates how institutional spiritual abuse operates through systemic exclusion, tokenism, and power manipulation.

If you haven't had a chance to listen to the episode, you can do so below:

Understanding Spiritual Abuse

Spiritual abuse is:

"a distortion and exploitation of spiritual authority to manipulate, control, use, or harm others, mostly through shame and fear"

Most often, spiritual abuse takes advantage of people's vulnerability and good intentions to exploit them. Unlike physical abuse, spiritual abuse attacks the very core of a person's identity and relationship with the divine.

Spiritual Abuse, in its simplest form, is;

Using the Bible and God to cause shame and harm, leading to a breakdown in relationship between God, self, and others.

This form of abuse is particularly insidious because it weaponizes faith—something meant to bring healing and hope—as a tool of control and manipulation.

Key Warning Signs: Learning from My Experience

My story reveals several critical warning signs that individuals and communities should recognize:

1. Systemic Tokenism and Exclusion

I faced significant barriers to leadership despite my qualifications, experiencing what can only be described as institutional racism wrapped in religious language. Churches practicing spiritual abuse often:

• Make surface-level commitments to diversity while maintaining exclusive power structures

• Use marginalized individuals as tokens to project inclusivity

• Create impossible standards for advancement that disproportionately affect certain groups

2. Health-Damaging Workplace Stress

I experienced health struggles tied to workplace stress, which is a common consequence of spiritually abusive environments. In a spiritually abusive environment, people are often silenced and othered through a variety of tactics.

3. Gaslighting and Reality Distortion

Spiritually abusive leaders gaslight you into thinking you are crazy. They manipulate perception by:

• Dismissing legitimate concerns as "rebellion" or "lack of faith"

• Using biblical-sounding words, often called Christianese, to give themselves the appearance of being righteous, but they use this type of language to shame and diminish others

• Telling those who have brought up issues of abuse that they aren't "trusting God" enough or aren't "submitting with a meek spirit"

4. Authoritarian Leadership Structures

When churches regularly preach about and emphasize spiritual authority, you can be sure that trouble is around the corner. In an unhealthy church, the pastor or the highest levels of leadership functionally take the place of Jesus in people's lives.

Other warning signs include:

• Requiring unquestioning obedience with an implicit or explicit suggestion that this equates to obedience to God

• Using a sense of divine position to exert pressure to conform and suggesting this position is unchallengeable

• Demanding their way over your free will and scaring you with threats to your reputation if you don't comply

5. Isolation and Control Tactics

Spiritual abuse occurs when leaders encourage individuals, especially abuse victims, to distance themselves from outside sources of support. This occurs when clergy counsel victims not to report abuse to the authorities, or not attend support groups (or counseling) not sanctioned by the church.

Additional Red Flags to Watch For

Warning signs of spiritual abuse include intolerance for questions and doubts, using the Bible to arouse fear and rigid "us vs. them" binaries, and leaders who demand unwavering loyalty, often threatening anyone who doesn't comply with being cut off from the community or God.

Other concerning behaviors include:

• When ministry leaders view other orthodox ministries as competition rather than allies

• When ministry leaders are more concerned about their brand or territorial expansion than demonstrating the life and teachings of Jesus

• When ministry leaders rarely confess their mistakes and failures while frequently critiquing others

The Devastating Impact

Religious trauma can manifest in multiple ways, such as the manifestation of mental illnesses, such as anxiety disorder, depression, or eating disorders, and can cause long-term psychological damage.

Spiritual abuse often leaves victims with traumatized bodies, disordered imagination, and broken relationships, making the path to healing all the more challenging.

Taking Action: A Step-by-Step Guide

For Individuals Experiencing Spiritual Abuse:

1. Trust Your Instincts: Many people who are suffering from spiritual abuse feel they are bad people or not trusting God when questioning religious leaders. Remember that healthy faith communities welcome questions and promote growth, not fear.

2. Seek Outside Perspectives: If you're on the staff of a church, it can be difficult and much more complicated to identify spiritual abuse if you feel like something is off. Reach out to trusted people in your social network and ask for their thoughts from an outside perspective.

3. Document Everything: Keep records of incidents, conversations, and policies that concern you. This documentation can be crucial if you need to report abuse or seek legal action.

4. Build a Support Network: Connect with trusted friends, family members, or counselors outside the abusive environment. Appropriate and healthy support is essential.

5. Consider Professional Help: Talking with professionals about religious trauma can empower individuals to explore their religious experiences objectively, recognize if they're in an abusive environment, and engage in pertinent healing strategies.

6. Know When to Leave: You know it's time to leave when leadership deliberately disrespects you and leadership stands by and does nothing. But when you match that energy, leadership takes offense. That's not a table you are welcome at, and for your health and well-being, you need to leave.

The Path Forward

Healing from spiritual abuse is possible with time, therapy (lots of therapy), and truth-telling among people who are known and trusted. While the damage caused by spiritual abuse can be profound, recovery is possible.

An old Irish saying has been a balm to me as I've decided to share my story publicly,

"Tell the truth and shame the devil."

I believe Dr. King's words that history bends toward justice. My conviction is that spiritually abusive leaders should ALWAYS be exposed. All of the Storytellers from the Austin Stone, along with the work of organizations like Bodies Behind the Bus, demonstrate that silence is breaking and accountability is an outcome worth fighting for.

My experience at Austin Stone serves as a crucial reminder that spiritual abuse is not just about individual bad actors—it's about systemic problems within religious institutions that prioritize image over integrity and power over people. By recognizing these patterns and taking decisive action, individuals and communities can work together to create safer, healthier spaces where faith truly brings healing rather than harm.

The journey toward healing and justice is long, but stories like mine and those of the other storytellers prove that change is possible when survivors find their voices and communities choose to listen. As we move forward, let us commit to creating religious environments where all people can experience the divine love and acceptance that faith is meant to provide.

This article is based on my testimony from the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast, which centers on the voices of spiritual abuse survivors. If you or someone you know is experiencing spiritual abuse, please seek help from qualified professionals and support organizations.

As the Bodies Behind the Bus series, "Stories from the Austin Stone," continues, I've been wrestling with how the burden of bringing to light the narcissistic and toxic culture of the Austin Stone has fallen on minority shoulders. For context, the Austin Stone is a 6-campus church spread throughout North, South, Central, and West Austin. During my almost decade at the church, the ethnic makeup of the church has been predominantly affluent white members.

The percentage of white congregants is significantly higher than that of any other ethnic demographic within the church. If memory serves me correctly, the percentage of white congregants is ~90% or higher when we combine all six campuses. The reality is that many incidents of emotional and spiritual abuse, manipulation, and controlling and coercive spiritual practices have happened to heterosexual, cisgender, white men and women. Yet, of the four stories being shared in this series, only one storyteller is a heterosexual white woman. The rest of us are ethnic or sexual orientation minorities.

The Common Minority Experience Attending the Austin Stone

I can't count the number of times minority congregants shared how they were struggling with being a part of the church. For many, issues revolved around loneliness and feelings of not being welcomed. Oftentimes, especially for minority women, they would see white peers, be welcomed and invited by staff and volunteers to join various ministries in the church, while they were not.

One Sunday, toward the end of our family's time at the church, my wife and I saw a single African American woman arrive for a new visitor information session. As we peeked into the room where the meeting was taking place, we saw groups of new people chatting and getting to know one another. We noticed this woman alone in the middle of the room.

My wife, Angela, looked at me and said, "You've gotta be kidding me, I can't believe this." Before I could respond, she was making her way to introduce herself to this woman whom we'll call K. They spoke for a few minutes, exchanged information, and promised to stay in touch with her during the week. My wife grabbed coffee with K and learned she'd been at the Stone for a few months, and my wife was the first person ever to take the initiative to speak with her.

Angela and K stayed in touch, but within a few more weeks, K shared that she would not be returning to the church. She felt like she didn't belong, wasn't welcomed, and wouldn't be able to find a community there. Angela thanked K for her honesty and candidness, affirmed her feelings and decision, and assured her that she'd love to stay in touch regardless of where K went to church.

Are there minorities represented at the church who have friends and a sense of community? Yes, of course. Are there minorities on the staff? Yes, there is. So what's the problem? The problem is that these people tend to be exceptions rather than the rule. Yes, some minorities feel welcomed and included in the church. Even fewer do work on staff. However, this demographic does not accurately reflect the overall minority experience within the church.

The Unspoken Expectation for Minority Staff Members to Assimilate or Leave

In my experience, I've only heard of the 1% used in negative terms. For example, bikers associated with groups like the Hell's Angels often refer to themselves as "one percenters." In social hierarchical terms, the 1% refers to the wealthiest Americans, who possess more personal wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.

Within the context of the Stone, the one percenters are a few minorities who have served in a staff role within the church. Sadly, when I refer to minorities who have worked on staff, I am explicitly talking about ethnic minorities. It is not possible for someone who identifies as anything other than heterosexual and cisgender to work at the church.

There is a contingent like myself who were willing to persevere through being in church spaces where it was clear we were different and the space wasn't created for people like us. We believed leadership when they said they wanted to be a church that demonstrated the teachings of Jesus in every facet of the city. Including the areas where people like us live.

For many of us, we were ridiculed by our family and friends for being a part of " a big white church" while at the same time being treated as second-class citizens by the church we sought to serve.

It was challenging to feel seen and wanted as minorities on staff. It was virtually impossible to be a minority on staff and not assimilate to the church's values and culture. There are minorities who love the Stone. They love the music, the preaching, the people, and so on. For the vast majority of these minorities, they have assimilated into the same values and culture of the Stone.

Sadly, in my experience, for the minorities that don't assimilate, they don't remain on staff very long. Essentially, to be a minority on staff at the church, you have two options.

1. Assimilate, leave your culture, perspective, and story at the door, and know your job is mostly secure.

2. Don't assimilate and make sure your resume is up to date.

The experience of these "one percenters" at the Stone reveals a troubling pattern of conditional inclusion—where diversity is welcomed in appearance but not in substance.

This dynamic creates what could be called cultural erasure, where minority staff members must choose between authentic self-expression and job security.

The dichotomy presented—assimilate or exit—fundamentally contradicts the church's stated mission of demonstrating Jesus's teachings, as it forces individuals to sacrifice their God-given identities for institutional acceptance. The experiences of multiple minority staff members who refused to assimilate serve as a critical lens through which to examine whether the Stone's practices align with its proclaimed values of genuine Christian community and inclusion.

We Don't Need White Saviors But We Do Need Allies

As difficult and unlikely as it is for a minority to attend the Stone, let alone work at the church, it's a miracle that the majority of storytellers in the Bodies Behind the Bus series are minority voices. This isn't hyperbole.

Each storyteller is the top one percent. The number of events and possibilities we needed to align to overcome every barrier to not only deciding to become members of the church but to serve there for years are astronomical. The uniqueness of our presence gives us comes with experiences and a perspective few can truly relate to or understand.

Sadly, because of how rare our presence is in this institution our experiences can and have been brushed aside or disregarded. I've personally heard current and former staff and congregants say, "this series would carry so much more weight if (insert heterosexual white male or female) told their story."

I say this as clearly and honestly as possible.

White brothers and sisters with your own wounds and traumatic experiences your story matters, your experience matters, and your voice can help stop others from enduring what you have.

As minorites with our own wounds and traumatic experiences we don't need your story to come save us. The reality is your story will help our experiences be given the consideration and seriousness they deserve.

We hope our stories give you strength and courage to consider sharing yours. Come be our allies.

Last week, the Bodies Behind the Bus Podcast (BBTB) launched a series titled "Stories from the Austin Stone."  If you aren't familiar with BBTB, they highlight the stories of religious abuse survivors.

They've covered stories from within various networks and denominations, including the Acts 29 Network, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA), and many others. Many of their stories have hit close to home for me, but none more so than this series on the Austin Stone. 

For those who aren't familiar with my background, I was part of The Austin Stone (also known as The Stone) from 2011 to 2020. I served in various capacities at the church, from being a church member to a resident, and in multiple pastoral and local mission roles. As someone who spent the better part of a decade at the church, I experienced firsthand how this church has been viewed as a 'golden child' and blueprint for American evangelical churches. 

A theme I noticed within each episode is the church's belief in its exceptionalism. The Stone is a unicorn in that it's a predominantly white, affluent, conservative congregation that experienced exponential growth in the heart of a progressive city, Austin, TX. The growth the Stone experienced in the late 2000s occurred quickly, catapulting it to the forefront of American evangelicalism. 

A boom in church attendance almost two decades ago has been leveraged to justify the necessity of the Stone's existence. This is as more and more stories come to light, highlighting a culture of abuse, narcissism, and toxicity at the hands of Stone leadership. 

The Hubris of Exceptionalism

If you haven't already, I highly recommend listening to this series—the first episode, Intro to Stories from the Austin Stone. The episode does an exceptional job of sharing the history of the church, along with its level of influence in Reformed Baptist circles. 

Based on my understanding, the rapid growth in the late 2000s and early 2010s is where the narrative of its exceptionalism originated. As a result, everything the Stone does is filtered through the lens of, 'look how fortunate you are to be a part of our super special church.' This line of reasoning is used as a motivator to encourage congregants to participate in more of the church's initiatives. 

The fact that we were using the words 'hubris', 'exceptionalism', and 'church' in the same sentence is problematic in itself. What makes this worse in the context of the Stone is how they've weaponized this same exceptional narrative to exploit their workforce, cover up scandals, and justify a lack of financial transparency. 

Exploit their Workforce

During B's Story, we hear about how B raised her salary to work for the Stone. When I became a resident, I also had to support raise my salary to work for the church. This is the case for anyone who works for the church as a resident. 

Included in the salary that residents must raise to provide for their basic needs are fees paid to the church. The majority of residents live at or below the poverty level. Still, the financial sacrifice is viewed as justified because they get to be developed to serve in ministry as a career from one of "the best" churches. 

The reality is that, out of the thousands of residents who have gone through the Stone's residency program, perhaps a few dozen have served in a ministry capacity for any length of time after their residency ended. When we tally up all the residents who have gone through a residency, we have thousands of laborers who have paid their employer to work their job. This model has earned the Stone hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. 

One of the biggest ironies is that the people who do the majority of the ministry work are often the least paid employees in the organization. Meanwhile, the most senior leaders, who are the most removed from day-to-day tasks in running the church, are the highest-paid workers. If you're on the 'executive elder' team, which is the highest level of leadership, you are guaranteed a six-figure salary. 

How can the church justify this? They're special. They're exceptional, blessed by God. If you don't believe them, consider the size of the church. Church attendance is their validation of God's special anointing. 

Cover-Up Scandal

I've written about the most prominent church scandals that have happened at the Stone extensively in these articles:

• Aaron Ivey - Another Case for Why Evangelicalism Needs to be Torn Down

• The Austin Stone and Worrisome Public Statement

• Churches in Public Schools: A Sanctuary or Safety Risk?

The TLDR of the scandals that have happened at the Stone is they're like John Gotti, the "Teflon Don," none of it sticks. Within the executive elder team (the highest level of leaders), there has been a mismanagement of donated funds, a cover-up of sexual assault against a minor, and sexual misconduct involving a minor. 

Lack of Financial Transparency

As you'll hear about in future stories, there was well-known financial mismanagement by senior leadership, which was also known for years by multiple executive elders. The Stone also has what they call 'Partnership Covenants.' This document outlines a series of statements that every member of the church is expected to adhere to and renew annually.

During my time at the church, one of the top two questions every year from congregants is, 'Where can we see the salaries of the pastors and church staff?' Every year, as staff, we were given standard responses to share with congregants. 

Once, I was part of a conversation where a staff member asked the Lead Pastor, Kevin Peck, directly how he navigates questions about the church's finances. Kevin's response was, 

"I tell whoever asks to see our itemized budget and staff salaries, to show me their budget and salary first, and then I'll show them ours. That usually takes care of it." 

The church exists because of each church member's tithes and offerings. Because of this, the congregation has a right to know where their money is going and how it is being spent.

Ben's story does a great job of highlighting other ways this exceptionalism rears its ugly head in the life of the church. I can't help but wonder how the 'exceptionalism' card can be played as a get-out-of-jail-free card time and time again. 

Here's the thing: The Austin Stone isn't exceptional. God was just fine long before the Stone existed, and God will be just fine, I'd argue even better, without the Stone. 

The more the truth comes to light about the abuse, narcissism, and toxic culture that the church exudes, the clearer it will become that the best thing it can do for God and its people is to no longer exist. 

My kids take forever in the shower. Despite a very clearly communicated 10-minute shower limit, my wife and I often bang on the door around the 20-minute mark and yell, “TIME’S UP, TURN OFF THE WATER!”

I don’t know if it's genetic or if it's a behavior common to all older kids. But I can’t be too upset because when I was their age, I used to take really long showers, too. As the bathroom door opens, the initial cloud of steam exits, and the thoroughly bathed culprit walks out, my wife asks, “What were you doing in the shower for that long?”

Typically, I answer on the child’s behalf with, ‘nothing, standing there.’ To which the guilty child nods their head in agreement and carries on with the rest of their day.

After the latest long shower incident, I found myself reflecting on what I actually did in the shower as a kid. What came to mind was a game where I cupped my hand to catch as much water as possible. When my hand was full, I would close it to see if I could hold on to the water.

Whether I closed my hand slowly or fast, I could never hold on to the water. I realized that trying to hold water is a helpful metaphor for the impermanence of life.

As I’ve been studying Zen Buddhism, I keep returning to how overwhelming and comforting impermanence, one of the ”Three Marks of Existence,” can be. In case you are unfamiliar with the three marks, here is a list:

1. Impermanence

2. Non-self

3. Nirvana*

How Impermanence in Life Overwhelms

Across human history, there have been two realities that often overwhelm and, at times, even terrify us. The first is that we can’t control time, and the second is that we will all eventually die.

Within Christianity, both of these realities aren’t directly addressed; rather, their weight is shifted from ourselves to God. We recognize we can’t control time; what I have is all I get, and that’s scary.

But God controls time, and God is good, so you can relax because God ‘took the wheel.’

When it comes to death, Christianity offers, what I would argue is an ‘illusory promise.’ In a more crass expression, some might say it provides a ’false promise.’ What I mean by this is that for Christians (the same can be said of Jews and Muslims; I just come from a predominantly Christian background), we are told faith in Jesus guarantees us eternity in heaven.

In reality, this isn’t a guarantee or promise we can verify. What is being shared when we are told all Christians (or Jews, Muslims, etc.) who believe in God go to heaven is a faith statement, not a factual one.

My goal is not to argue the merit of heaven, hell, or even an afterlife. I want to point out how, as a Christian, I was taught to engage with these two realities.

What I have come to deeply respect about Buddhism is how it doesn’t shift the weight of these realities but faces them directly. Instead of worrying about who, if anyone, is in control of the limited time we have on this blue rock called Earth, Buddhism emphasizes being fully present and alive to experience each moment.

For example, being consumed by our screens has become so commonplace that my family and I have made a game out of calling out whenever we see someone consumed by their digital device in public. There’s a particular family restaurant where my family enjoys eating dinner. It’s a 90s (think Saved by the Bell) themed burger and pizza place that is beloved by locals.

As a family of six, we don’t get to eat there often because it is expensive. While we talked about how much everyone liked their meal and asked each other goofy questions, we noticed the family sitting to our left.

Throughout their entire meal, no one said a word. While the mom chomped on her salad with her right hand, her eyes were glued to the screen, infinitely scrolling in her left hand. Meanwhile, her son had his iPad on the table, Beats headphones over his ears, completely tuned out of where he was, and was immersed in YouTube.

Here’s my point. Even though that family was physically at the same restaurant as my family, they weren’t present. Not being present is akin to not having been there at all.

So often, we worry about choices we made in the past or what-if scenarios that haven’t happened in the future, and we completely lose the only moment in time we actually have, the present. Buddhism doesn’t just help us deal with the reality of time; it also directly addresses the reality of death.

How Impermanence in Life Comforts

I’ll turn 41 later this year. When I was a kid, I thought 40 was old.

Being in my 40s, I can attest that I am no longer a young man, but I’m not old either. The reality is, if things go as well as possible, I’m approximately halfway done with the time I have left on earth. The truth is, there’s much in my past that I regret, trauma I’ve experienced, and decisions that I wish I could change.

Here’s the thing: the suffering I experienced in the first half of my life has shaped me into the person I am in the second half of my life. Yes, bad things happened to me, my family, my community, and our world over the last 40 years. But the majority of those bad things aren’t happening anymore.

That’s the comfort of impermanence. Yes, things will always change, and we all eventually pass away, but also, yes, things changing is really good and healthy.

Currently, 2000 federal agents have been deployed to Los Angeles to engage protestors standing against ICE's shameful behavior toward immigrants. Genocide continues in Ukraine and Palestine. My family has been sick for over a week with a stupid illness we keep passing to each other.

All of these things genuinely suck, but we can also learn from each of them, grow, and find strength in knowing they won’t stay this way. Time continues to tick, so it’s paramount that we are mindful to be fully present in every moment.

Death is inevitable, but we don’t have to hold on to the hope of heaven as the only way to work through this reality. Instead, we can embrace that change is good and healthy and empowers us to become the most compassionate, engaged, and mindful versions of ourselves. So when our time comes, we will have left our world better off than when we came into it.

*As a side note, my list of three marks comes from the understanding of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. Traditionally, nirvana is not a listed mark, and is replaced by suffering.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” - William Faulkner

The gist of William Faulkner’s quote is that events that happened in the past continue to influence our present. Faulkner isn’t alone; other well-known sayings about our past impacting our present are:

• “You can’t escape your past.” 

• “The ghosts of your past will always haunt you.” 

Even if we never consciously ponder or recognize it, we implicitly acknowledge that the past doesn’t stay in the past. Have you ever wondered how events that occurred in the past continue to impact us in the present?

Understanding Our Two Consciousnesses

In his book Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay or teacher) discusses the two consciousnesses we all possess. There is:

1. Mind Consciousness: Is our active awareness, or what Western psychology calls “the conscious mind.” 

2. Store Consciousness: This is our root consciousness, which is where all our past experiences are stored. It’s also where we learn and process new information. In Western psychology, this is called “the unconscious mind.” 

According to Thay, both consciousnesses are like a house. Our mind consciousness is like the living room where our active awareness and presence take place, and our store consciousness is like the basement where our emotional seeds reside. 

When painful or traumatic past events move from the basement of our store consciousness into the living room of our mind consciousness, emotional seeds such as anger, fear, and grief sprout as well. If our emotional seeds are left unchecked, they can quickly become uncontrollable vines that take over our mind consciousness and lead to rage, anxiety, or depression.

The longer these seeds can enter our mind consciousness unchecked, the more poisonous they become. They are like a toxin that spreads from our minds throughout the rest of our bodies. 

Like fighting an addiction, the first step in healing from our pain and trauma is recognizing there’s a problem. Let’s examine how we recognize the root trigger of our pain and suffering.

Stuck in the Past

My family and I wrapped up a Marvel marathon yesterday, culminating with Avengers: Endgame. Throughout the movie, we all felt noticeably melancholy. Our mood was impacted not because the weather was gloomy or we’re currently fighting off a virus. As anyone who's watched Avengers: Infinity War knows, we’re all feeling down because Avengers: Endgame is the next chapter of the Avengers losing to Thanos. 

Infinity War ends with Thanos obtaining all six infinity stones, snapping his finger, and instantaneously erasing half the life forms in every galaxy. That’s right, trillions of living beings are destroyed at the literal snap of a finger. 

So, sitting through the last two hours and change of our Marvel marathon, we were all melancholy. Interestingly, around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, our moods completely changed. During the final battle, there’s a sequence where Captain America wields Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir. A few moments later, a bunch of time portals open up, and every superhero lost in Infinity War shows up to help defeat Thanos once and for all. It is epic, and it completely took my family from borderline depression to exhilaration. 

As amazing as those movies are, none of what they showed is real. There isn’t a superhero named Steve Rogers who wears America-themed spandex. Aliens never attacked Earth, and half the population of all reality was not wiped out at the snap of a finger. But the pendulum of emotions my family and I felt was 100% real. 

We literally cried watching our favorite heroes turn to ash, and we shouted with joy when Captain America summoned Mjölnir, and it came to him. The Avengers perfectly demonstrate the power of images from our past to trigger real emotions in our present. 

Our store consciousness is like the movie theater of our lives, where our past is constantly being projected. We understand in principle that the images we see in our thoughts and dreams don’t really happen in the present. However, just like in the movies, witnessing the pain, suffering, and trauma of our past re-creates real pain in our present. Often, we can become imprisoned by these memories, leading us to experience real suffering and real anxiety over and over again. 

When we relive our pain to the point of becoming imprisoned in our minds, the emotional seeds have become vines that have taken over the living room of our mind consciousness. Instead of dealing with the root issue, our out-of-control emotional responses, we try to suppress and self-medicate to numb the pain. 

In America, the most common method of self-medication is consumption. We try to make ourselves feel better by going on shopping sprees, reinventing ourselves on social media, finding comfort in food, traveling, prescription medications, and in some cases, alcohol and drugs. 

If America has taught us anything, we cannot consume our way out of our suffering. We cannot consume our way to true happiness.

Within Christianity, the answer would be to pray. To take our burdens to God, or lay our worries at the feet of Jesus. That’s all well and good, and by all means, I think praying is a great thing to do. The problem with this response is that it keeps us as passive participants in our healing. 

God isn’t the one who led our emotional seeds to grow into vines that have taken over our mind consciousness. We did that. If you want to seek God for help in getting to the root of your pain and suffering, by all means, do so. However, you don’t need to wait for God to find peace, healing, and happiness. 

Mindfulness Brings Us to Our Present Reality

The practice of mindfulness is the healing balm that we all already have to help us heal from our pain and trauma. Within Zen Buddhism, mindfulness is being fully present and aware in the moment. It involves paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and environment without judgment.

Master Thich Nhat Hanh describes cultivating mindfulness like this:

“To cultivate the energy of mindfulness, we try to engage our active awareness in all our activities and be truly present with whatever we are doing.” (Reconciliation, p. 9)

One of the most significant barriers Americans face in finding peace, healing, and happiness through mindfulness is that we are a highly dualistic people. I think our religious roots within the Abrahamic faiths play a significant role in shaping our thinking. For Christians, Jews, and Muslims, we all believe there is one God, the good guy, and evil (Satan and sin), the bad guy. 

We tend to think in black and white and ignore that most of our lives are lived in gray areas. For example, if I became angry, most, if not all, the people I know would believe that’s bad. The solution is not to be angry but to be happy. 

With mindfulness, this duality doesn’t exist. My anger is just that mine. It’s as much a part of me as joy, gladness, gratitude, etc. So the goal is not to suppress the emotions our society has deemed ‘bad’ but to learn to show kindness and compassion to ourselves as we experience any emotion.

Master Thich Nhat Hanh says it this way:

“Mindfulness is there not to suppress or fight against anger, but to recognize and take care. It’s like a big brother helping a younger brother. So the energy of anger is recognized and embraced tenderly by the energy of mindfulness.” (Reconciliation, p. 11)

Within our store consciousness, we have the seeds of anger, fear, and sadness. But we also have the seed of mindfulness. As we learn to become more present with ourselves, we will notice when the seed of anger has sprouted and entered the living room of our mind. Once we see this, we can use our breathing to acknowledge our anger and invite the seed of mindfulness to join us in caring for our anger. 

Through mindfulness, we begin pruning the emotional vines that have taken over our living rooms. As we become more present and aware, we start addressing the root causes of our pain and sorrow.

The next time a traumatic thought comes to mind, we invite our mindfulness seed to join us. Mindfulness will remind you that this experience isn’t happening in the present. Just like a movie, it’s not happening. At the same time, mindfulness can welcome the very real emotions that come with our trauma. Instead of our feelings growing into uncontrollable vines, mindfulness will give our emotions healthy space in our living room to be present and cared for without becoming uncontrolled.

Growing up in the early 90s, I witnessed music that forever changed the world. I'm old enough to remember when Nirvana hit the scene and forever changed rock and roll through their dark and gritty Grunge. I also remember when Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg made Hip-Hop mainstream with their first albums.

I came of age when Rock and hip-hop became radio mainstays. It was also the mid-90s when my mom started taking me to church. The world I lived in, which was heavily influenced by Rock and Rap, was the polar opposite of the world I was exposed to on Sundays at church. By 1998, my world of rock and hip-hop had merged into a new genre of music that seemed to appear on the scene out of nowhere.

While the radio waves were filled with Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Mandy Moore, The Backstreet Boys, and NSYNC, I listened to what would become a new genre of Rock infused with Rap; Nu Metal. When Nu Metal hit the scene, part of my world ceased being either/or and suddenly became both/and. It used to be that I hung out with my friends who were inundated with the East Coast vs. West Coast styles of Hip Hop. Or I hung out with my metalhead friends, fixated on Metallica, Pantera, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots.

Both groups began to merge as new bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, and my favorite, Linkin Park, came onto the scene. What was even more unexpected is that I never believed the culture I lived in and the church culture I was acclimating to would collide. On September 21, 1999, the unexpected happened as P.O.D.'s Fundamental Elements of Southtown was released.

The Great Christian Bonfires: Burning CDs for Christ

I remember going to a church camp in the summer of 2000. As most church camps did at the time, the last night was filled with altar calls inviting us to 'give our lives to Christ.' These tearful services would then transition to a big campfire where newly converted (or those recommitting their lives to Christ) would go to a mic and share how Jesus had changed their hearts over the last week.

A common practice was for kids to show how the power of the gospel had changed them so much that they had broken free from the satanic influence of secular music. As an act of worship or sacrifice, I'm honestly not sure what the act demonstrated; kids would throw all their 'secular' CDs into the fire. Of course, this was always followed by raucous applause from counselors and fellow campers as tears of holy joy flowed down our faces like the wine of Capistrano.

I couldn't help but chuckle as I wrote that last sentence. You can't make this shit up. This was the world of evangelical youth culture at the time. In July, we burned our satan music at the youth camp, and by September, we were digging through our couch cushions looking for change to buy new copies of the CDs we had burned.

Going into my Sophomore year of high school, I was still on my youth camp kick and had been able to stay away from devil music all summer. On the first day of school, I had even burned a few CDs of Christian Worship songs that I was going to give to my friends so they could hear the healing power of the gospel!

This was all good until one of my friends asked to play the CD I gave him in front of our entire Geometry class. I don't know if my friend meant to embarrass me. Once the teacher permitted us to turn on the music, we didn't make it 90 seconds into the first song before all my classmates laughed uncontrollably.

I explicitly remember two guys sitting a few feet away from me banging on their desks in laughter asking, "what is this shit?!" When our teacher noticed the class's hostile reception to the music, he turned it off. To go from Jesus loving white boy music to silence was a hard and awkward transition.

Those few moments of silence felt like an eternity and for the first time I felt how out of touch and cheesy Contemporary Christian Music was in the Rock and Hip Hop world I lived in.

More than twenty years later, I can still feel the sting of this incident. It is easily in the top two most embarrassing moments of my high school life.

The Band Christian Kids Weren't Ashamed Of

But everything changed when P.O.D. (Payable on Death) came on the scene. For the first time, a band of Christians made music that resonated with the Rock and hip-hop world.

The same classmates who laughed at me, and asked what the "shit" I was listening to was, loved P.O.D. There was finally a band that loved Jesus but wrote music your mama and church pastor wouldn't listen to.

As a seventeen-year-old trying to figure out how to navigate living in two worlds, P.O.D. was a bridge. They were Christian without being in-your-face about Christianity. The lead singer of P.O.D. is Sonny Sandoval, who, like me, is ethnically mixed but was raised in a predominantly Latino culture.

He recently published a memoir, Son of Southtown: My Life Between Two Worlds. Out of a sense of nostalgia, I decided to pick up a copy.

The Cringe P.O.D. Once Saved Me From, Son of Southtown Now Makes Me Feel

My sense of nostalgia came with a pause as I held the book at the bookshop. The pause came because I encountered the book while walking through the Christian section. P.O.D. never labeled themselves as a Christian band.

They were adamant that they were Christians with an amazing Nu Metal band. Yet, the leader, a childhood hero of mine, had his memoir in the Christian section of the bookshop. Why? Well, looking at the back of the book I noticed it was published by Baker Publishing Group, one of the largest Christian publication companies. That took some of the excitement out of reading the book.

Overall, the book is ~250 pages and is a quick and easy read. As great as it was to read details about the band and learn about Sonny's personal life, time and again, the book gave me the same cringeworthy feelings the band once saved me from.

Sonny is unashamedly outspoken about his faith, which I totally respect. What cringes me is that, on the one hand, he regularly criticizes church folks for how they judge him and people like him who socially and culturally don't fit a Christian stereotype. Yet, he repeatedly spits out the same dogma that those from within the church, who harshly judged him, hold.

At times, I became frustrated because I couldn't understand how he seemingly cannot connect the judgmentalism he has been a victim of to a specific ideology that is transferred via the dogma he advocates for. For example, at one point, he discusses how he doesn't believe in coincidence because he worships the Creator God and rejects the 'worldly ideology' of evolution.

What's worse, he regularly mentions being nonjudgmental toward those the church deems outsiders while simultaneously saying he does so to demonstrate the truth that we are all sinners and that truth and salvation is only through Jesus. Ironically, the same ideology that led to closed-minded tribalism celebrated through campfire CD burn sessions was the same ideology Sonny advocates for throughout the book.

In my opinion, Sonny is too heavy on making sure people know he's unashamed to be a Christian, though he's also clear he's not like "those" Christians. He also holds back from sharing his more honest or raw feelings. When describing times of deep hurt, we don't get the unfiltered version of his thoughts and feelings. Instead, we are given a very filtered and refined version.

For example, multiple chapters build up to a major split within the band when the original guitarist, Marco Curiel, abruptly quits the band, costing them millions of dollars with their record label. Once Sonny takes us to the climax of the fallout, he ends up skipping over many of the details and instead only shares broad statements. I think both the overt waving of the Christian flag and the filtered versions of major life events result from Baker Publishing being behind the book. Had Sonny gone with a non-Christian publication company, I think he would have had the freedom to speak more honestly and from the heart, which would have improved the book exponentially.

I Don't Question the Authenticity and Intentionality of Sonny's Life

Despite my ideological concerns about the book and the irony that results from said ideology, there was a lot I appreciated. Part of the reason it was so easy for me to pick up on patterns and differences in theological convictions is that Sonny is clearly a transparent human being. He wears his thoughts on his sleeve, which is a breath of fresh air in our highly curated digital lives.

Not only is Sonny a transparent person, but he is also a man of deep conviction. He quickly admits that his life is not the standard of success or righteousness for anyone. He's simply a guy from Southtown (San Diego, CA) who has had the opportunity to live an incredibly unique life because of the career opportunities he has had as the frontman of one of the biggest Nu Metal bands in history.

Walking away from the book, I have a newfound respect for how much Sonny genuinely loves Jesus. In a world where every vice is available at his beck and call, he has prioritized being a good husband, loving father, and faithful friend. All of these traits are worthy of admiration.

This book is good. It's not one of the best memoirs I've ever read, but it did accomplish its goal of taking me down memory lane. It was great to learn more about the life of someone who had a meaningful impact on me during such a tumultuous and impressionable time. I will always cherish what P.O.D. represented to me in the early 2000s. Closing the book, I can appreciate that part of my story. P.O.D. helped shape; however, I understand but respectfully disagree with much at the root of Sonny's Christianity.

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It was the middle of 2022 when a friend casually said, "with all the crazy shit your family has experienced within the church you should write a book." I acknowledged the statement with a chuckle.

It turns out my friend gets the last laugh because my book An Exile's Guide to Christianity was published on March 1st, 2025! As blown away as I am to think I wrote a book, this wouldn't have been possible without you.

I mean it. When I started writing it felt like I was sending my thoughts, words, emotions, and experiences into a black hole. Would anyone read what I wrote? Would anyone care about what my family experienced within the church? Could the questions I'm asking and answers I'm finding help others who have had similar experiences?

Despite my trepidation every time I hit 'send,' you all responded to my questions with a resounding YES! As my words served you, your emails, comments, and subscribing helped my family find healing. With every like, every email, and every small encouragement, you gave me the confidence to write and press 'send' again—and again, and again, and again.

I've written over 100 articles in the last two years, many of which comprise the book's chapters. For your convenience, here is a short excerpt from the introduction of the book where I reflect on the genesis of the book,

No, my end goal was never to write a book. My goal was to create digital 'warning' signs for others who wondered but were afraid to ask, "Are evangelical churches safe spaces for me?" I also wanted to create a safe space for people who were deconstructing and asking questions. In the end, I wrote over 100 articles in about two years.

An Exiles Guide to Christianity is the culmination of a journey. For some, the chapters within this book won't be polished enough. They won't be 'theologically precise,' they won't put a nice bow on difficult questions, and they won't leave you walking away with three ways to save the American Church.

In response, I would say I agree. There are far better writers, far more 'churchy' books, and far more authors with hubris who believe their niche views are the correct or only biblical views on any number of doctrinal questions.

Within the pages of this book, I share my thoughts on my journey based on my experiences and learning. Where the book is raw, unpolished, imprecise, and inconclusive, it is the most human. 

Below is a link to purchase a copy of An Exile's Guide to Christianity! I'm asking for $15.00 a copy, but I never want money to be a hindrance for someone interested in my work. So, I have also included a pay-what-you-can option so no one is left out.

Grab a copy of An Exiles Guide to Christianity

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This isn't the end of my writing journey, but in many ways, An Exile's Guide to Christianity does feel like the close of a chapter. I'm not going anywhere, though I am processing what my writing will look like moving forward.

Regardless of what this next season looks like, I couldn't have made it this far without you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you! Thank you for subscribing and for resonating with my work. Thank you for every like, comment, and conversation. If I said it a million times, it still wouldn't be enough to express my gratitude for you.

Like so many Christmas Eve nights before it, our house smelled like Fraser Fir and cookies baking in the oven. The TV was on a heavy rotation of The Grinch, Elf, and A Christmas Story, and my kids swung like a pendulum between checking on cookies, counting presents, and watching a movie. The Christmas tree shined as bright as ever, the windows let in the fresh, crisp breeze, and our home looked like a quaint seasonal den of comfort.

Something was different despite smelling, looking, and feeling like many Christmases before. Even after years of deconstruction, changes in our beliefs and understanding of God, and the emotional rollercoaster of institutional Christianity, we've always gone to Church on Christmas Eve. Yet, this year was different. While sitting at the family table during lunch, our team went back and forth, sharing all the reasons why we should go to Church and all the reasons we should not.

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Ultimately, my teenage daughter won the day when she shared she wanted to go. If nothing else, Church on Christmas Eve was a family tradition and held a place of nostalgia for her. We all agreed and decided after dinner, we'd get dressed and go to an Episcopal service where a family friend is the Reverand.

Like so many Christmases before, we spent the afternoon picking our outfits, trying different ensembles, asking each other 25x, "How does this outfit look?", showering, and finally getting dressed for Church. Despite the comforting nostalgia and longstanding tradition of attending Christmas Eve church services, my family's evolving beliefs and sober examination of institutional Christianity led us to a poignant turning point. On Christmas Eve 2024, we walked out of a church service for the first time, and I'm so grateful that we did.

The In Group We Don't Belong To

The lead-up to arriving at Church came with excitement and anticipation that I had not felt for much of this holiday season. My kids were excited and bouncing off the furniture as they anxiously waited to load up in our SUV and head to Church. My wife looked amazing, my kids bathed on the same day (it is the little things that mean so much), and I was excited to see our friend lead the service.

When we pulled into the Church, I was relieved to notice plenty of spots available, which made parking a breeze. Internally, as I held my youngest daughter's hand and started walking toward the Church, I knew how we were greeted would set the tone for the evening.

As I reached the front door, I held it open for my family. Entering the Church last, I caught the end of an awkward exchange between the greeters whose faces clearly expressed, "You people must be new," while handing my kids candles. Their greeting was courteous but forced, like when you walk into a store and an employee addresses you with the customary, "Hey...Let us know if you need anything."

Once we turned the corner from the narthex to the Church, we ran into our friend, which was the highlight of the evening. We exchanged hugs, wished each other Merry Christmas, and told her we were glad to see her. When my wife turned toward the pews and asked, "Do you want to sit here?" The elderly couple in the row grabbed their belongings and spread them out as if to say, "Oh, sorry, my purse is sitting here. You'll need to find somewhere else to sit."

Making eye contact with the couple, it was clear that their facial expression screamed, "Please sit somewhere else." I told my wife, "Let's find somewhere else to sit." We settled on a pew in the back of the Church where no one else was seated. As we waited for the service, I caught an elderly couple to my left gawking at my family as if we were glowing like the baby Jesus.

We hadn't been at Church for 5 minutes, and I had already had second thoughts about this decision. For the sake of my kids, I'd let the uncomfortable start to the service slide, do some breathing exercises, and focus on being present during the liturgy.

The Liturgy I Can No Longer Say Earnestly

The choir finished the first song, and I thought I would make it through the service; okay, I thought to myself. Looking back, I now realize that the first song, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," was the only piece of the liturgy I would recite. With every song, prayer, and scripture reading, I repeatedly asked myself, "What are we doing here? Do I even believe what we're saying?"

The truth is I don't believe much of what the liturgy sang, prayed, and read during the service. I couldn't get past how the service effortlessly blended birth narratives unique to Matthew and Luke that were unreconcilable. Emotionally, I already felt like an outsider, and now, intellectually, I knew I wasn't a part of this tribe. The conviction and honesty with which the Church was reciting that Jesus was God born as a baby by a virgin were lines I couldn't bring myself to say because I don't believe it.

I made it to the sermon and felt like the rest of the service would be downhill. As much as I care about my friend, the sermon was the final straw. Specifically, my friend made the statement that,

"God began reconciling humankind 2,000 years ago at the birth of Jesus, and we are living as a part of that story tonight."

No. I don't agree with that statement at all. I reminded myself,

"The God I know is far bigger and more loving than the deity celebrated tonight. The God I know is love and didn't stand passively by for millions of years as humankind unquestioningly felt our way through history. God has been in and among humanity from our first breath. God has walked with us, nurtured us, given us this beautiful creation we call earth to grow and sustain us, and has throughout history sent unique messengers (some call them 'spirit people') who have a unique intimacy with God so they can remind and show the rest of us how to walk in the Way of God."

If pressed, I believe Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and innumerable unnamed men and women have been used by God to call us back to the Way of life in God. I love and care deeply for my friend, but this was when it became clear that the Church was no longer my spiritual home. To claim God is reconciling us implicitly teaches that we have committed a wrong that needs to be set right.

I skipped ahead a few pages in my bulletin and noticed that after the sermon, we'd recite the Nicene Creed and, shortly after, corporately confess our sins. I squeezed my wife's knee and whispered, "Do you want to stay for the entire service?" She looked at me and paused. In 18 years of marriage, I've asked my wife thousands of questions, but "Do you want to walk out of a church service?" has never been one of them.

She replied, "I think once they start communion, we can sneak out without being noticed." Communion was too far away. Once the sermon ended and we recited the Nicene Creed, I was emotionally and spiritually already gone. The only part of me left to go was my physical presence.

With the time for confession fast approaching, I began feeling like I may have a panic attack. What kind of God, on the night we celebrate the coming of the human who most embodies what God would be like if God were a human, would want us to grovel and ask for forgiveness on this night? What had my kids done while baking cookies, wrestling with their own emotions and history with the Church, getting dressed, and celebrating the season constituted the need to publicly apologize to God in the company of dozens of strangers doing the same thing?

I'm sorry, but no. I was finished. Before we got to confession, I leaned over, told my wife it was time to go, and began walking out. To my shock, as soon as we got outside, my oldest daughter (the one who asked to go to service) said, "Don't say a word until we get to the car."

Through the sound of doors closing and seat belts clicking, my daughter said, "I'm so sorry I asked us to come to this. I don't know what I expected, but I'm glad we left. I wanted Christmas to be like it was when I was little, but now I know that season is over."

The Realization the Church is No Longer My Spiritual Home

My daughter perfectly captured what I felt and wrestled with every second I was inside the Church. 'That season of my life is over.' I didn't realize until we left that my whole family was wrestling with the same thing.

I love Jesus. I admire his teachings, his passion, and the life he lived. However, the more I study and appreciate what Jesus embodies, the more I recognize these same virtues in the Buddha, Muhammad, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and several other spiritual figures.

It's only fundamentalist thinking that claims "my way is the only way." Whether this "way" pertains to God, politics, or how to wash dishes, truth often reveals itself in various forms through different cultures and traditions. The God who created us understands that humankind is not a monolith. Walking out of the Christmas Eve service reminded me that the institution we call the Church is dogmatic by design. Regardless of where a congregation falls on the conservative-to-progressive spectrum, being a church inherently involves some degree of dogmatism. I can't confine God to a single tradition, religion, or theological perspective.

The Church is not my home, and I don't know where I truly belong.

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In the last few weeks, physical and sexual abuse against women and minors at the hands of religious leaders has been in the news. As horrific and tragic as any abuse is, it has become commonplace for these types of tragedies to come into the limelight.

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I remember when the movie Spotlight came out about decades-long sexual abuse cover-ups by the Catholic church, I thought, “This is a Catholic problem caused by forcing priests to be celibate.” It wasn’t long before new incidents proved my hypothesis of religious sexual abuse being a strictly Catholic problem wrong. Shortly after the #metoo movement came the Protestant churches, mainly evangelical #churchtoo movement. Both movements created a platform that allowed women to share their experiences around sexual abuse. The #churchtoo movement emphasized the sexual abuse experienced within church environments.

The stories that broke in the last few weeks once again show sexual abuse is more extensive than its Catholic and Evangelical versions. On October 30th, a story out of Dallas, TX, came out detailing Imam Wisam Sharieff’s abuse of a woman revert and her daughter. Please be warned that the story will be incredibly graphic if you click the link. Then, on November 12th, news broke that The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned after they failed to take sufficient action after learning about sexual abuse that took place within Christian summer camps.

These latest stories strike incredibly close to home for me as the last and final religious institutions my family has associated with are the Episcopal Church and Islam. Candidly, these stories have been the ‘straws that broke the camel’s back’ regarding my willingness to participate in or identify with any religious institution.

What I want to help clarify in this article are the three primary means by which religious leaders can so prevalently abuse their followers. The combination of power dynamics, cultural norms, and institutional cover-ups creates a fertile ground for abuse by religious leaders.

Power Dynamics

Power dynamics refer to how power is distributed and used within a relationship or group. It plays a crucial role in enabling religious leaders to abuse their followers by establishing an environment of fear, dependency, and control.

In her 2021 book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, author Amanda Montell shares the behaviors that scholars have identified as best describing the ‘cult criteria.’

“charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, an us-versus-them mentality toward nonmembers, and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy.” (pg. 32)

Religious institutions are built on qualities such as finding a ‘gifted’ (code for charismatic leader), spiritual behaviors meant to alter our way of thinking and living, in-group/out-group dynamics, and building the ministry at all costs. The result of emphasizing these qualities leads to the mass amount of sexual abuse coming to light.

Because religious leaders occupy positions of authority, it creates an imbalance of power that leaves followers vulnerable. For example, when a pastor, bishop, imam, etc., is publicly acknowledged as “called by God, “ questioning the leader is akin to questioning God. Furthermore, when followers are brave enough to question suspicious behavior, the leader or the institution they represent quickly spins the incident. This behavior is so prevalent psychologists came up with a term for it: gaslighting. Again, Amanda Montell explains:

“When language works to make you question your own perceptions, whether at work or at church, that’s a form of gaslighting…Across the board, gaslighting is a way of psychologically manipulating someone (or many people) such that they doubt their own reality, as a way to gain and maintain control.” (p. 137)

The very structure of the institution is built so tools like gaslighting, special language (e.g., this is an attack by satan to test us), and in-group/out-group dynamics to foster a culture where questioning the leader’s motives or actions is discouraged. It only takes a single follower being silenced after speaking out to instill fear in every other follower that speaking up can jeopardize their spiritual standing or community acceptance.

The psychological impact of these power dynamics is profound, with many individuals developing a dependency on their leaders for guidance and validation, making it difficult to challenge or report abusive behavior. Furthermore, leaders may exploit this dependency by instilling fear of punishment or damnation, leading followers to believe that their loyalty is a measure of their faith. Ultimately, the intertwining of authority and fear creates a toxic environment where abuse can fester unchecked, demonstrating the urgent need for accountability and support systems within religious organizations to protect vulnerable members.

Victim Blaming and Cultural Norms

Victim blaming and cultural norms play a significant role in perpetuating abuse within religious contexts. One tool that reinforces these harmful dynamics is ‘thought-terminating clichés.’ These are catchphrases that shut down critical thinking and discourage questioning of authority figures.

“Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert J. Clifton, this term refers to catchphrases aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical thought.” (pg. 84)

In religious settings, these clichés often include phrases like “Everything happens for a reason” or “It’s all part of God’s plan.” Such statements not only dismiss the experiences of victims but also discourage further investigation into potential abuse.

These cultural norms create an environment where victims are often blamed or silenced. By discouraging honest conversations and critical thinking, religious communities inadvertently protect abusers and increase followers’ dependency on religious leaders. This dependency can be exploited, with victims often feeling “special” or “chosen” when singled out by authority figures, not realizing they’re being groomed for abuse.

The cycle of victim-blaming and cultural silencing makes it increasingly difficult for victims to speak out or seek help. As followers become more dependent on religious leaders, these authority figures are viewed as infallible or even god-like, further enabling potential abuse.

Institutional Cover-Ups

American author and activist Upton Sinclair, in his book The Jungle, wrote;

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair

The truth is that institutional cover-ups play a critical role in enabling religious leaders to evade accountability for abuse, primarily through prioritizing the organization’s reputation over transparency and victim support. We see this, particularly with the stories of the Catholic church, #churchtoo, and Archbishop of Canterbury. In each instance, other clergy and institutional leaders knew early on about the abuse but silenced victims in the name of ‘protecting the institution.’

Currently, the Anglican Church is dealing with a reckoning among their Bishops, as the opening sentence of this Sky News article points out:

“Bishops refused to call for the Archbishop of Canterbury to resign because they were thinking about their own promotion prospects, one senior church figure believes.” (Culture of fear and careerism stopped bishops calling for Archbishop to resign, says senior Church figure)

The Church of England isn’t unique. Many religious leaders are motivated to protect their public image, future job prospects, and reputations within the larger institution. As a result, they employ tactics to downplay or outright deny abuses, thereby maintaining a façade of purity and integrity. This not only protects the abuser but also creates an environment where victims feel unsafe coming forward.

Furthermore, the need for established mechanisms for accountability within these institutions exacerbates the problem. Many organizations operate without clear protocols for reporting and investigating abuse. When allegations arise, they are often handled internally in a way that favors the institution rather than the victims. A clear example is The Austin Stone’s spin on bringing in an organization called MinistrySafe to conduct an investigation. The mission of MinistrySafe is to protect churches, not victims. These tactics remove the burden or responsibility on the institution and its leaders, placing it on the victim or relying on non-disclosure agreements.

The pervasive nature of religious, sexual abuse is not just a crisis of faith — it’s a damning indictment of the very institutions that claim to offer salvation and a path to a relationship with God. As we’ve seen, power dynamics, cultural silencing, and institutional cover-ups create a perfect storm for predators to operate with impunity. It’s time we acknowledge that these are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a systemic rot that has infected religious organizations across the spectrum. The question now is not whether abuse exists but how many more victims must suffer before we collectively decide that enough is enough. For those brave souls ready to break free from the chains of religious manipulation and seek help, know that you are not alone.

Resources for Victims of Religious Abuse

• RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) — Offers support for survivors of sexual abuse, including those from religious contexts.

• Recovering from Religion — Provides resources and support for individuals leaving harmful religious experiences.

• SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) — Supports survivors of clergy abuse across various religions.

• Therapy Route’s Guide on Religious Trauma Syndrome — Offers information and resources for healing from religious trauma.

Remember, seeking help is not a sign of weakness but a courageous step towards reclaiming your life and faith on your terms. The path to healing may be long, but you don’t have to walk it alone.

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I recently wrote about how I decided to leave Christianity and embrace Islam. Hitting ‘send’ on my article and releasing it to the world came with quite a bit of anxiety. The root of my worries was around how hostile Christians would respond.

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Tragically, they did not disappoint. I had my fair share of Christians reach out to tell me things like:

• I’m now a ‘wife beater.’

• I must desire to ‘marry a 5-year-old.’

• I must want to see people stoned for things like adultery.

• They hope I burn in hell.

• I have traded a relationship with God for idolatry. The only hope I have is to repent and put my trust in the saving work of Jesus.

As much as all of those comments sting, I noticed two things. The first is that they actually had a much smaller percentage of responses than I had anticipated. Second, they all are great examples of why I came to the point where I knew it was time for me to leave Christianity.

No matter how much I tried to reimagine a Christianity that reflects the life and teachings of Jesus, the clearer it became that I could not entirely separate from the culture evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity has created in America. It reminded me how, for years, while I was in ministry, I firmly believed the dogma and rhetoric of mainstream Christianity and that my faithfulness to the movement and its institutions could bring about healthy and needed change. My experience taught me that believing committed members can change a toxic institution from within is naive. If you want to see genuine change, the best thing you can do is leave.

I first learned this lesson at the local church level. I have now realized it is also true at the more significant level of religious tradition. Based on my experience as a pastor, three case studies show that reforming a religious institution from the inside doesn’t work.

10 Years of Faithful Service and Nothing Changed

Over a decade, I served at three different churches, each of which was incredibly toxic. What made them so bad was that they held to a strict theological dogma, were led by charismatic but narcissistic leaders, and believed in an ‘ends justifies the means’ approach to leadership.

Church One: An Affluent Mega Church

This first church presents a troubling case study of persistent toxicity within religious institutions. Over a decade-long period, numerous issues plagued the church, revealing a pattern of mistreatment, manipulation, and resistance to change.

From the beginning, this affluent mega-church displayed concerning leadership practices. As a newcomer, leadership created a culture of unquestioning obedience. The church’s elder-led structure lacked external oversight, a common issue in many toxic religious institutions. This absence of accountability allowed toxic leadership to flourish without checks and balances.

As time passed, staff members were consistently undervalued despite their qualifications and experience. In my own experience, despite having an M.Div. and extensive ministry experience, I was repeatedly given entry-level positions.

Throughout my time in this church, I watched as leadership employed manipulative tactics to maintain control. At its worst, the lead pastor made false accusations about me to pressure me into an apology for something I hadn’t done. This incident ultimately revealed a culture of gaslighting and silencing dissent.

As one of the few minorities on staff, I felt treated as a token person of color, expected to address all race-related issues. Additionally, I was pressured to engage with and discuss right-leaning conservative resources, regardless of my personal beliefs and convictions. This situation highlights a broader problem of ideological conformity and racial insensitivity within the church.

The church’s approach to mental health was deeply problematic. When I experienced severe stress-related health issues, the church’s counseling center steered them away from medication, emphasizing “being more spiritual” instead of providing proper care.

Perhaps most troublingly, this church consistently resisted attempts at change. When my wife wrote a letter detailing her experiences as a minority in the church, leadership attempted to silence her and sweep the issues under the rug. Attempts to address problems were dismissed, deflected, or used for further manipulation.

Despite years of faithful service and attempts to address these issues internally, no meaningful change occurred. In recent years, multiple leaders have been discovered to have committed sexual assault against minors, but change has not come. This case underscores the difficulty of changing toxic church cultures when a handful of leaders hold all the power. So long as congregation members continue tithing, there is no incentive to make changes.

Church Two: An Urban, Multiethnic Church

The next church I served in after my time with the mega-church ended presents a troubling example of how toxic leadership and organizational dysfunction can persist within religious institutions. Despite its outward appearance as a thriving, mission-focused church, internal observations by multiple staff members and I revealed a pattern of issues that had gone unaddressed for years.

At the core of the church’s problems is a hierarchical structure in which an exclusive group makes all senior leader decisions, primarily centered around the lead pastor. This established hierarchy creates a caste system within the organization, dividing staff into “thinkers” and “doers.” Such a structure stifles innovation and demoralizes staff members who feel their input is not valued.

The church also operates in a constant state of flux, with plans, goals, and job roles shifting frequently. This reactionary posture leads to confusion among staff and prevents the establishment of stable, effective systems. The church’s DNA and core values remain unclear, contributing to a lack of direction and purpose.

Multiple staff members described organizational communication as “the worst experience in any marketplace or church context.” Staff members often work in silos, unaware of what other departments are doing. This lack of coordination is detrimental to staff members. Still, it works to the advantage of senior leadership, as no one but top leadership knows the full context of everything happening within the organization.

Despite these issues being recognized and brought to leadership’s attention, no significant changes occurred through internal reform. Attempts to address problems were met with dismissal, deflection, or further manipulation. The lack of external oversight or accountability structures allows toxic leadership practices to continue unchecked.

Despite years of feedback and attempts at internal reform, the persistence of these issues demonstrates the difficulty of changing toxic church cultures from within. After multiple attempts by elders, staff, and congregants to implement needed change, leadership did nothing. In the end, I left the church, most elders left, many staff also quit, and a large segment of the most faithful and tenured church members left.

Church Three: A Small Church Plant

When we think of churches, we often imagine places of solace, community, and moral guidance. However, this final case study of the last church I pastored reveals a disturbing reality of toxic leadership and spiritual abuse that can lurk beneath the surface of religious institutions.

The story unfolded over six months. I witnessed a stark contrast between the church’s public image and the internal reality.

While presenting themselves as advocates for the marginalized, the lead pastor and his wife engaged in behaviors that contradicted this image behind closed doors.

Key issues identified were:

• Prioritizing personal platform-building over pastoral care

• Abuse of power and gaslighting tactics to silence dissent

• Conflict avoidance and unilateral decision-making

• Widespread mistreatment of staff and congregants

• Gender-based discrimination in conflict resolution

Perhaps most troubling are the structural barriers that prevented meaningful change within the church. The elder-led structure and a lack of external oversight created an environment where toxic leadership ran rampant and thrived. Attempts to address these issues were consistently dismissed or deflected, leaving staff and congregants feeling powerless and unheard.

This case study highlights the need for robust accountability structures and transparent church leadership practices. These safeguards are necessary for leaders to be held accountable for their actions. Without them, it doesn’t matter how much internal care, conversations, and reforms an advocate for healthy change tries to bring; they will only burn themselves out.

As people of faith, we must remain vigilant and demand better from our religious leaders. Healthy reform and change are impossible in environments discouraging open dialogue, accountability, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. When this happens, the only realistic option is to leave those spaces and join or create truly healthy spaces for spiritual growth and community building.

The truth is that the more you try to give and sacrifice to reform an institution from within, the more you only hurt yourself. Along with hurting yourself, you also hurt those within your spheres of influence as they identify your presence in these spaces as a sign that they are safe and can be trusted. Because of these realities, here are three key reasons why leaving toxic religious institutions is the healthiest choice.

3 Reasons Leaving a Toxic Religious Institution is Better than Staying

1. Maintaining Your Integrity and Protecting Your Health

Staying in a toxic religious environment often requires compromising your values. Leadership and those with influence will continuously pressure you to ‘prove your loyalty to the institution.’ The more you seek to prove you are part of the in-crowd, the more you’ll be willing to jeopardize your integrity.

Staying in a toxic religious institution can also have severe consequences for your well-being. In my case, the constant stress and mistreatment led to severe stomach problems, anxiety, and PTSD. The church’s counseling center, rather than addressing these issues properly, steered me away from medication and emphasized “being more spiritual.” Leaving allows you to seek proper care and healing.

2. Escaping Manipulation and Gaslighting

Toxic religious spaces often employ manipulative tactics to maintain control. I experienced this firsthand when told to “be quiet and serve faithfully for an undetermined amount of time” upon moving to Austin. Then again, when the lead pastor made false accusations against me, leadership pressured me to apologize for something I hadn’t done. Leaving breaks this cycle of manipulation.

Your talents and efforts are almost guaranteed to be exploited without proper recognition or compensation. Despite my qualifications and experience, I was consistently undervalued, given entry-level positions, and even faced pay cuts. Leaving allows you to use your gifts in environments that value you appropriately.

3. Finding Authentic Community

Finally, toxic religious spaces often fail to provide genuine community. Despite years of faithful service, I experienced little support, coaching, or shepherding. My wife’s concerns about her experience as a minority were ignored by leadership and swept under the rug. Within each case study, there were also clear examples where leadership only cared about my family and others so long as they saw a use for us. Leaving opens the door to finding a community that genuinely supports and values all its members for who they are, regardless of what they can offer or bring to the table.

Where To Go From Here

The decision to leave a toxic religious institution is always challenging. It often involves deep emotional ties, years of investment, and the fear of the unknown. However, as these case studies show, staying in such environments can harm one’s spiritual, emotional, and even physical well-being.

Remember, leaving is not a sign of failure or lack of faith. On the contrary, it’s an act of courage and self-respect. It’s a declaration that you value your integrity, health, and authentic spiritual journey more than the approval of a flawed human institution.

As you move forward, consider these steps:

• Take time to heal: Recognize that you may need time to process your experiences and recover from any trauma or stress you’ve endured.

• Seek support: Connect with others who have had similar experiences. You’re not alone, and sharing your story can be therapeutic.

• Redefine your faith: If spirituality is important to you, take this opportunity to explore and redefine what faith means to you outside of toxic structures.

• Be patient with yourself: Rebuilding trust and finding a new community takes time. Be gentle with yourself as you navigate this new chapter.

Leaving a toxic religious institution is not the end of your spiritual journey — it’s a new beginning. It’s an opportunity to find or create spaces that reflect the values of love, compassion, and genuine community many seek in their spiritual lives.

Remember, your affiliation with any institution or religious tradition does not determine your worth. You have the power to shape your spiritual path, one that respects your dignity, nurtures your growth, and allows you to live with integrity. By choosing to leave, you’re not just changing your own life — you’re setting an example that may inspire others to seek healthier spiritual environments, ultimately contributing to positive change on a broader scale.

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Those exposed to Christianity know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Many Christian communities embrace the story as a fundamental historical truth. The story of Adam and Eve goes like this:

Adam and Eve, the first humans created by God, lived in the idyllic Garden of Eden, a paradise filled with lush vegetation, abundant fruits, and beautiful landscapes. They enjoyed a close relationship with God and lived in harmony with nature, tasked with caring for the garden and forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their innocence and unity represented the ideal state of humanity.

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An important context is that while in this state of innocence and unity, the rest of creation was in a 'perfect' state, or what most Bible scholars refer to as a 'complete' state. The specific phrase is 'very good,' which comes from Genesis 1:31 and follows the six days of creation detailed in the preceding verses, culminating in the creation of humanity. Though theologians and scholars interpret this passage differently, the most mainstream interpretation is that creation was in a state of perfection.

However, as the story goes, Adam and Eve's curiosity led to temptation by the serpent (often interpreted literally to refer to Satan, who spoke as a serpent), resulting in their disobedience when they consumed the forbidden fruit.

Fun Fact: The Bible is explicit in that Adam and Eve consumed a 'forbidden fruit,' though most commonly, Christians refer to the fruit as an apple. The word 'apple' is never used in the account. The notion that the fruit was an apple comes from Christian art and literature dating back to the 4th century CE. In Jerome's translation of the Bible (The Latin Vulgate), he translated the Hebrew word 'peri,' which means fruit, as 'malum,' which has a double meaning of apple and evil.

This act of defiance led to their expulsion from Eden. Unique to Christianity is the idea that not only did this act of defiance lead to expulsion from the garden, but it also broke God's completed work in creation.

The idea of original sin suggests that when Adam and Eve took a bite from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they brought sin into the world. This act of defiance led to a distance between humanity and God, caused death to enter into the human experience and made all humans going forward inherently sinful. We call it "original" because it's considered the source of all the sins committed in human history. As a result, everyone is born with this tendency to sin, which is why we all need a little help from divine grace to find our way to salvation.

For thousands of years, Christianity took this story literally and contributed all that is broken and wrong in the world to this one act, at some place in time, all the way back in the Garden of Eden. Many people accepted this story as a historical account.…until Charles Darwin appeared on the scene.

Darwin Broke Christian History

A poignant detail that often gets overlooked by some Christian Creationists is the remarkable goodness that humanity has experienced thanks to Darwin's theory of evolution. This theory has led to profound benefits in various fields, particularly medicine, where it plays a crucial role in studying genetics and disease, ultimately aiding in developing vaccines and treatments that save lives. It also deepens our appreciation for biodiversity by shedding light on the relationships between species and their habitats. It also enhances agriculture through selective breeding and genetic modification, thus helping to secure food for many.

Moreover, evolutionary psychology offers valuable insights into human behavior and the development of societies, encouraging us to foster scientific literacy and critical thinking. The theory promotes collaboration across disciplines, uniting fields such as genetics, ecology, and anthropology. Ultimately, it enriches public understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the extraordinary processes that shape life on Earth.

The reason Creationists have a hard time recognizing the benefits of evolution is because it also turned the historical assumption about Adam and Eve into a myth at best. Despite fewer and fewer voices advocating for anti-evolution ideas (Answers in Genesis, anyone?), the reality is that those voices are quickly moving into fringe fundamentalist corners.

Evolution has unequivocally shown that human life occurred over approximately five billion years. Moreover, without first parents, Adam and Eve did not exist to plunge humanity into a death spiral when they were cast out of God's perfect and complete creation.

The Christian Death Rattle to Save the Bible from Science

When I first became a Christian, I was introduced to apologetics and taught that 'defending my faith' was crucial for my growth as a mature follower of Jesus. No battle was more significant than the one between Christianity and science.

Looking back, this 'rallying of the troops' to defend the literal interpretation of the Bible, which I was introduced to as 'Christianity' was nothing more than a desperate scramble to hold on to a premodern, monolithic story of salvation used to argue for the supremacy of Christianity.

While in the more fundamentalist circles, like the one I found myself in, they doubled down and sought to teardown evolutionary ideology and replace it with a biblical one. For other Christians and denominations not committed to an inerrant and infallible view of the Bible, there was a quick pivot to reinterpret the Adam and Eve story as symbolic.

However, at the heart of both movements was still the ontological belief that humanity was by nature alienated from God and inherently sinful. What most people did not realize until the last few decades was how Darwin had already irreparably fractured the premodern mentality that people are born alienated from God and sinful.

Darwin Undermined a Perfect and Complete Creation

At the crux of Adam and Eve's defiance leading to separation from God, death, and sin into the world is the implication that the world was perfect, good, and complete.

Bishop John Shelby Spong explains:

"To ascribe goodness to creation implies that the work of creation is complete. Darwin, however, made us aware that the creation is even now not finished. Galaxies are still being formed. Human life is also still evolving." (Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 97)

Once you recognize the truth that the cosmos is still a work in progress, the whole literal and mythological framework creation, original sin, and even the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is built on comes crumbling down. Bishop Spong goes on to say:

"What is sin? It is not and never can be alienation from the perfection for which God in the act of creation had intended for us, for there is no such thing as a perfect creation. Thus there was no fall into sin." (ibid, 97)

This truth this lesson teaches is one Christianity desperately needs to learn from our Jewish and Muslim kin. Viewing the completion of creation as solely a result of humanity's arrival in history reveals an incredibly self-absorbed and egotistical perspective. Our self-centeredness around the Adam and Eve story within the Garden of Eden framework attests to the reality that we are bearers of the 'selfish gene' that English Biologist Richard Dawkins often refers to.

A New Theological Landscape

A reality that all churches, regardless of denomination or affiliation, need to recognize is that millions of people are continuing to walk away from Christianity due to theological and religious frameworks built on no longer believed presuppositions. As an American millennial, I live in a society where truth is more complicated and challenging.

Through shock politics, we've seen the normalization of misinformation and the rise of catchy phrases like "fake news" and "no cap" (no cap = I'm not lying). We are the first generation to have seen the moral compass of our political, economic, community, and religious institutions crumble before our eyes. This age of misinformation has led to a deep skepticism of any leader or institution peddling unsubstantiated rhetoric.

As faith and science converge, evolutionary theory invites us to explore new dimensions of traditional Christian beliefs, especially the story of Adam and Eve. This journey encourages a re-evaluation of sin, perfection, and humanity's purpose in the cosmos. As many seek new paths outside Christianity, churches are called to reflect on theological frameworks that may no longer resonate. Embracing the dynamic nature of creation can inspire a more nuanced spirituality, harmonizing our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

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